On The Scene

This layout came to me as I was sitting around, bored, and started drawing in my notebook for something to do. There are many things I’m proud of, and many things about it that I don’t like too. I’d love to hear what anyone who happens to read this thinks about it, but I’ll start you off with a list of critiques.

No Title

Firstly, it has no title, and besides the context there’s no indication of its blog-hood. I guess the title is my name, but I should probably mention something else somewhere.

Basic Layout

The layout is sort of basic and done to death. Header bar? Check. 900px wide column? Check. White content background, with shadows on either side? Check. And the pixel-patterns like those in the background are quickly becoming a cliche. (No offense to freshview for being the only one mentioned. I’ve seen many sites with such patterns recently.)

And speaking of the shadows on the content section, if you try loading this page in IE you’ll see another problem - the transparent .png turns white. That’s just no good.

Mild Haphazardness

The footer could have had more work put into it, and from a marketing perspective I could have tied everything in a bit closer to my main web design site.

The header image is quite large, and it’s a bit confusing for the first few seconds while the rest of the page loads in a flash (I even indexed my .pngs to make them a few kb smaller - that’s how much I care.) However, the way it is it’s simply impossible to reduce, I’ve already posterized it as far as it will go.

The colors in general are quite bright, and were picked without any palette in mind.

And finally, I had meant to break the border to give the page a sense of wholeness rather than header | content, but I couldn’t figure out what to do it with.

Good Stuff

I don’t think I got it all wrong, though. The header is visually interesting, I think, and the brown background looks fairly sharp despite being a bit unoriginal. Also, the way the two images for the background (the repeating pattern and the darkening gradient at the top) will line up is a thing of beauty, given their small size.

Also, the design looks very much like what I sketched out. It’s always nice to be able to capture an idea well, even if you find out later that the idea wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Your Mission

Should you choose to accept it, you can do one or both of two things:

1) Tell me what you hate about this site.

2) Go do the same for your own site, and then come comment about that. I’d love to hear it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under design, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.