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Friday Focus 10/10/08: All Colors of the Rainbow

October 10, 2008 By Sophia Lucero

No color in the spectrum is left unturned this week on Friday Focus. It’s all rainbows here—but no unicorns though!

Designs of the Week

Technically, this site is dominated by warm, orangey hues, but it’s colorful nonetheless. And the Design literally has rainbows in it! More importantly, it’s bold and inspiring. Best tip we can get here is to be unfraid to use black to add focus and contrast.

Since this site calls for a more formal look, the colorful graphics were isolated into a corner so as not to distract. If you look closer the circles look like the bottom of the cone of site logo! The 3D-going-2D is a neat twist.

Here’s a darker design that still plays with the spectrum from end to end. Not to mention some transparency. I’m slightly disappointed that the background graphics fade out as you scroll down, but it’s probably for readability’s sake.

Since this site is so big, what better way to represent the different sections than with various colors? Strictly speaking it’s not a very good idea and it should be supported by something more effective, like icons, but I really like the areas where the rainbow effect is applied. It doesn’t even look overwhelming, color-wise. And I just love the footer navigation graphic.

If you’re going for a rainbow pallette, you don’t have to use every single color for everything. In this site you can see the text use two shades of yellow, while the links use blue. Again, we have transparency here. Finally, the combination of wispy fractals and a crocheted background texture is not something you see everyday, but it looks wonderful!

Social Media Weekly

Design – Color & Design In Politics: Obama
The unofficial design-centric campaigns for US presidential nominee Barack Obama is nothing short of inspiring. This is just one of the articles that compiles them.

Programming – Forget Flexibility, Design for Now!
An article that discusses how designing for flexibility can hold us back.

Friday Focus 09/05/08: Blue

September 5, 2008 By Sophia Lucero

This week on Friday Focus: the most popular color on the planet, blue. After the immense popularity of green (and pink?) during the Web 2.0 wave, it looks like web designs are going back to everyone’s favorite color. And we have a bucket full of examples to prove it.

Designs of the Week

What makes this website work? It’s to clutter-free and straight to the point (the jobs), and it uses a fun motif (the beach).

Another simple design that delivers through the details, like fading hover effects and decorative elements that make sure they don’t overpower the content. It really is the focus here, because as soon as you get out of the white boxes, the elements become dark gray. They give way.

Once more we see blue offset by dark gray, this time in the form of a wooden texture. I like that the header area covers the fixed background. I also like the screen overlay on the portfolio images. It’s an old school web design element, but it still works!

First there was water, and now we have sky. Another “cliche” association with the color blue, but with a twist. There’s a very elaborate footer graphic in green. Another interesting feature of this blog is that the posts use white text on a dark gray background. Again, people seem to like pairing blue with dark gray.

If there’s dark gray, then there’s sure to be black as well. It seems like this website took the complementary color of its company logo to make it stand out. Another nice one-page website.

This design is a little more quirky, combining grunge elements and illustration on a blue-and-black color scheme. There’s also a footer graphic here, though I’m not too sure this time why they chose an aerial view of the African jungle.

Social Media Weekly

Design – Breaking Bad Habits in Photoshop
Bad habits are hard to break. And when you’re working on bulky software such as Photoshop, you might want to streamline your process as best as possible. Start by getting rid of those bad habits like unnamed layers and erasing instead of masking.

Programming – Typechart
Preview different different styles of web typography as seen on Macs and PCs, then grab the CSS! Fantastic idea. Also contains excellent resources on the same topic.

Friday Focus 07/05/08: Bursts of Color and Collapsible Content

July 5, 2008 By Sophia Lucero

Welcome to the first Friday Focus for the month of July. This week: strong bursts of color and collapsible content. Curious combination? Read on!

Designs of the Week

This is probably the “most different” from the rest of the designs here. But it’s a good thing. It’s 100% fluid, makes good use of to show the striking background, and is very colorful.

A blog implementation of the collapsible content technique. Simple and effective design that pops.

I personally am not a fan of what he did to the background, it’s a little too busy and competes with the portfolio images, but it’s a nice design nonetheless.

It’s not colorful, but dark, monochromatic color schemes can be as rich as the rainbow too. The collapsing headers distinctly remind me of the legendary portfolio of Marius Roosendaal, but this design is unique in its own right.

Social Media Weekly

Design – 99 Free Canvas, Paper, Paint, and Metal Textures
People say grunge is the new “Web 2.0 look”. Whether or not you agree, it takes a lot more work to put together a nice textured design, but this page can help you out.

Design – Style Switchers Contest Results
Smashing Magazine held a contest that had designers coming up with creative presentations of website style switchers. Tons of inspiration here.

Programming – Improved Flash indexing
Google starts indexing Flash content. It’s what web designers have been waiting for…or is it?

Programming – Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes
If there is one part of a website that you should make sure works properly, it’s the URL. Some SEO advice for ideal URL design.

Friday Focus 06/13/08: A Dark Friday the 13th

June 13, 2008 By Sophia Lucero

It’s Friday the 13th, so let’s celebrate this eerie date with some dark designs.

Designs of the Week

Web design guru Dave Shea is behind this redesign (it’s his company, after all) that’s turning heads. Excellent effects using jQuery, and that accent image in the welcome blurb is reminiscent of 31three.

From brown to green, another textured design. This one’s a hybrid portfolio site since it incorporates blog posts and social media widgets, namely, ma.gnolia and Flickr. Brownie points for a 100% fluid layout!

Love the use of depth here, as well as the trusty jQuery for switching between featured portfolio works. It’s gray but it’s not boring. That’s hard to pull off.

This one’s a little out of place since it’s not dark enough and uses a drastically different color scheme, but this is a popular design this week. The footer, although not shown here, also gives the illusion of depth.

Social Media Weekly

Design – 10 Hollywood Designers To Watch Out For
Whether or not you think Hollywood films are crap, the worlds they have created just blow the mind and should be more than enough inspiration for you.

Programming – 10 SEO Rules for Designers
Even if you’re a designer, it’s important to know even just a little about related skills. Knowing SEO adds value to your work as it helps your clients become more findable online.

Programming – jQuery UI – ThemeRoller
Generate a consistent look for your webapp interface by choosing style and color options, then downloading the theme.

« Previous Page

Friday Focus 10/10/08: All Colors of the Rainbow

Designs of the Week

Social Media Weekly

Friday Focus 09/05/08: Blue

Designs of the Week

Social Media Weekly

Friday Focus 07/05/08: Bursts of Color and Collapsible Content

Designs of the Week

Social Media Weekly

Friday Focus 06/13/08: A Dark Friday the 13th

Designs of the Week

Social Media Weekly

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