Rhymes With Milk v1.0 It’s too ‘cute’ whatever that means. It is a bit cartoony. For posterity’s sake, my inspirations for future designs are as follows:
- Tutorial9
The Good: Although it too is cartoony, it is well executed cartoony. Also: 1px beveled edges, border radius (rounded corners), subtle gradients, and main content pops off the background.
The Bad: Color theme is merely okay (I don’t love the tans and yellows with the grey gradients, nor the dark blue links on the dark blue background).
- Viewport Wordpress Theme
The Good: “Hacks” the concept of the Wordpress excerpt field and pairs each post with a visual representation without making the visual the sole focus.
The Bad: Design is lacking overall. Plus, archiving is tough from the home page (no navigable pagination).
- nclud
The Good: Colors! Color scheme, although simple and narrow, is still very effective. There are a million shades of blue-green used for different things around the page. Light and subtle gradients define columns. 1px beveling again.
The Bad: Too damn blue. I almost wish there was something that really popped. Little “wow” factor.
- Shaun Inman
The Good: Amazing site. It has the most understated awesome I’ve ever seen in my life. A lot of the posts are almost almost Tumblresque. Look at past versions, too: SI7 (the October/Halloween version), SI9 (be sure to click the “Read Me” link to fully understand the brilliance of the design), and my personal favorite, SI10, which was a light yellow last time I visited (that’s right, it slowly changes color to define the time of year.) Also, good SI logo (very simple and recognizable).
The Bad: I didn’t come up with the design first. Also, its design is so different from my other inspirations, I’m torn between creating such a simple, clean layout like this, or a graphical wonderland like my next inspiration:
- Digitalmash
The Good: Incredible graphics from index page through to the most deeply archived and forgotten one. Note the Helvetica title image. It’s nearly impossible to choose just a few things to list right here. For a few, how about: Photo section header image, horizontal comment filing system, skewed post photo preview, incredible portfolio section, including awesome div:hover text highlighting.
The Bad: I’m not a fan of the long ~500px long background gradient. Some, not all, of the images trying to live up to the awesome imagery of the rest of the site don’t quite live up to the others (I’m talking to you, hokey Canon).
Side Note: This has got to be the most highly copied site design on the web, or at least the designer likes to talk about it more than anyone else. As a result, he has made his CSS next to unreadable. I’m not here to plagiarize anybody, I take pride in my original work, so I’m not going to steal other people’s code and pass it off as my own. I’d just like to take a gander at it to see how he did something particularly clever to expand my own arsenal of clever tricks. Unfortunately, Mr. Shaun Inman up there actually passes his through what is essentially an encrypter (I actually need to read exactly how he gets that to work. Remind me to do that tomorrow.) making his CSS literally unreadable to humans…I think. Okay, unreadable to me at the very lease. Same diff, though.
