Continuing on last week’s success, I figured I would give the Friday Focus another go, and will hopefully be continuing until told otherwise.

I hope you enjoy my picks of the week.

Designs of the Week

Lately, I have been seeing many designs implementing space or star images to their designs. The design is darker than I usually like, but for some reason the contrast seems really strong, and I love the use of red and blue to make certain elements “pop”. This is my favourite of the week.

I am really enjoying sites that use green effectively, and ashwebstudio integrates the colour nicely. The content area is really nice and clean. Everything looks fairly balanced and the design is not overstated. I wish the navigation hover effect was stronger, but I love the little icons they used to emphasize their items.

I had a really hard time finding a third design that I enjoyed. I wanted something that was pleasing to the eye, and interesting to look at. I wanted something that wasn’t blue and orange, and the Forest River Timber Homes site fit the bill. I don’t really like their sub-pages as much as their main page, but overall the style is interesting, and the strong contrast of the green on the dark brown works really well.

Digg Weekly

Design – 8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make
I have made more than one of the mistakes mentioned in the Wake Up Later post, but I continually hope that others will wise up and deal with their design and usability mistakes. Hopefully they will all read the post.

Design – Old Websites Sure Are Funny and Internet ’96
On the same line of thinking, there are some great articles on what the web was like twelve years ago now. It is funny to look at what corporate budgets bought online back then. Apple, McDonald’s and others all looking really ugly by todays standards.

Another Friday Focus coming your way this week. The first one of 2008, and what I think to be one of the first not done by AJ, as he is a busy man, so I figured I would try to fill his shoes when it comes to the focus for a while.

Things will mostly be staying the same, but I will of course be choosing the designs that really amazed me, as well as the top stories on Digg’s programming and design sections that caught my eye.

This week, I have three designs, one design article found via Digg, and one freelance article found via Digg.

I hope you all enjoy my picks.

Designs of the Week

Oddly enough, all of my picks this week for designs are from Web Design firms from various locations around the world.

The first one is from GregOne from Belgium. I love how dark the overall design is, but to make it easier to read sections with a black background, he pumped up the font size, and in the content area I love the green tab he used as the background for titles. I find the serif font used for most of the white text content a bit difficult to read, but overall, I really enjoy this design.

Next, I have South Creative from Australia. This design caught my eye because of the use of the creamy colours of the content topped off with a much darker header, and a brightly coloured logo. The design itself is fairly simple looking, but I found it to be very effective.

My third choice this week is FortySeven Media from the USA. Again a very distinct difference between the header and content areas, this time going for a lighter header and a much darker body. I haven’t seen much green focused web designs lately, and so walking through the normal black, blue, orange, and more blue, I really enjoyed this design. A very nice palette of colours used as part of a very interesting style.

Digg Weekly

Design – 26 Things to Do When Business is Slow and in Downtime Mode
There is no doubt on my mind that we are going into a recession, and it is the perfect time for all freelancers to find some extra work, get important tasks completed, and save a little extra money.

Design – Creating A Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky In Photoshop
I am usually not a fan of photoshop tutorials, but this one is really fun to do. With all kinds of interesting effects taken into account, this tutorial could be used as a basis to create all sorts of cool poster worthy designs.

Hey everyone, Friday Focus is back. I’m sure you’ve been hanging off the edge of your seat after dealing with a tough week without the focus last week. Well, no more worrying to do now. Hopefully everyone that was celebrating Thanksgiving last week enjoyed the holiday and any kind of vacation that may had have, but it is now time to get back to business. Let’s kick things off with three fresh sites.

Sites of the Week

First up is Beanstalk. This organic looking design features brown and light greens to create a simply fresh look for this hosted subversion tool.

Next up is Synergema. Another slick portfolio site, this one utilizing blues and greens, along with some snappy javascript to scroll between portfolio work. Plus, you have to give them points for that name.

And wrapping this week up is Come Home to a Tennessee Winter. Seeing how tomorrow is December 1st, I figured this was pretty appropriate. Falling snowflakes included.

Digg Weekly

Design – Pure CSS Dropdown Menu
I know there are a few of these out there, but what’s another one to add to your collection of bookmarked resources? This quick tutorial will guide you through the creation of a css-only drop down menu, without the need for JS.

Programming – 10 Absolute No-No’s For Any Freelance Web Designer
From Digg description: If you’re a freelance web designer, make sure you don’t make any of these common mistakes.

Hope everyone enjoys the week ahead.
Get your holiday shopping done! (or started)

P.S., If interested in what I’d like, please use the contact form. 🙂