For this week’s lessons, we visited the following websites:
webstyleguide.com: Really easy to use. Laid out the whole table of contents and had lots of straightforward, easy to understand information. The site itself was very “clean” and made use of a lot of white space. I liked that there were not lots of distractions and fussy graphics that took away from how much useful information was available.
universalusability.com: Ooh, I think I liked this one even more than webstyleguide.com, even though it seemed to encompass a lot of the same sort of material, because the design of the site was so awesome. It had pretty much the same layout, with the table of contents left-justified and not a whole lot of filler to confuse the eye, but the blue and yellow color scheme was so gorgeous.
jjg.net: Jesse James Garrett’s website. Very simple design, a left-justified list of his published works, followed by articles he has written and interviews with him. I particularly liked his article The Psychology of Navigation (Digital Web, 12/2002).
smashingmagazine.com: 50 great blog designs. My favorites were Susay, which had a vertical navigaton bar that looked like sections of a notebook you could thumb through. I’ve never seen a vertical menu before. Dollarshort, which had a sort of unsophisticated nature/tree type of graphic, but all in fall colors which I am immediately drawn to. Brad Frost’s Blog, which had kind of a cartoonish looking mouth graphic that the blog posts appeared in (ie, what is coming out of the author’s mouth; pretty inventive). Clemente, which had what was referred to as a “vintage” look, kind of like an antique manuscript/artwork/printing on vellum type of thing. I like the idea of an “antique” looking format for very modern technology. And Ollie Kavanagh, which had a purple and blue dominant look to it. What really struck me is the photo of who I assume is the author that was so beautifully rendered on the page it looked almost 3-dimensional. Some of these blogs were truly works of art.