These websites feature prominent use of the human hand in their designs, and it’s an interesting study in paying tribute to what we really create with, while using it to convey information.

Designs of the Week

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The site is a dictionary of technology terms alphabetized, and the hand morphs into each hand sign per letter. It’s a smart connection between the mobile device and how it’s our hands that interact with it.

Bright colors with a dash of pastel gradients, navigation links in the corners, and a page-wide border. It’s a familiar look for sure, and it’s the imagery and projects that will leave an impression on you.

The page is essentially a very long poster held up by the artist. The logos could stand to be arranged more neatly, and the content typography would benefit from a bit more refinement.

It’s not as obvious as the other designs, but the photographs on these pages are almost always that of hands. Whether this is intentional or not, it’s a good motif.

Social Media Weekly

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Design – Website Style Guide Resources
“A collaborative collection of resources for creating Front-End Style Guides and Pattern Libraries”

CSS, JavaScript – Let the Browser Handle Your UI Logic for You
“The next time you set out to build something new, look at its core behaviors and ask yourself if there is some pre-written, standardized part of the web browser that can handle some of the work for you.”

Design – Explained Visually
“An experiment in making hard ideas intuitive.”

It’s almost Halloween dear Friday Focus followers! While these designs won’t scare the lights out of you, the use of hands without showing much else of the rest of the person’s body is a somewhat creepy concept. Don’t let that chase you away though, their use in these designs are clever too.

Designs of the Week

Really like the idea of scrolling the page so the shoe meets the edge of this anonymous person’s jeans. The only drawback to this approach is it takes a while to load the content in between those two endpoints. Wish I could give points for typography but much of the text are just images.

Love the open layouts on every page, most make use of power lines and circular icons with a nice touch you don’t see everyday—droplets. Another thing I don’t see everyday? It’s so obvious but it’s still fun to see: using an iPhone as the background for the contact form.

I love the treatments on the headings and illustrations, the shadows and textures really take you several decades back. I think the body text could be tweaked more, I don’t think many people actually enjoy monospace fonts regardless of the mood one tries to convey.

A wonderfully clean design amidst the sketchy scrolling illustrations that speed up when you move back and forth the carousel items. You don’t see that break in formality anywhere else on the site, though, which is admittedly a little disappointing.

Social Media Weekly

Web Design – The Coding Designer’s Survival Kit
With some cool effects to boot!

Design – 7 Ways To Avoid Scary Web Design
Monsters are cool, but not design monstrosities.