We really like the Fuel Brand inc. website. Jay and I did a screen-cast review of it. It’s a pretty memorable experience, it’s more than your standard javascript interaction styled website. The interactions are very well done, they’re almost minimal and I think that’s what makes it work so well. The color change between section is a nice touch. The other things like the over states on the profiles and the news section are great.

What’s really nice and something we missed while doing the screen-cast is that they have completely branded out their profile pages, twitter and down to their tumblr sites. That’s thorough and I have to say very impressive work.

Really very simple page for this software website. I like the non complexity of the design and limited color palette. It really works well with the name “vanilla”. What I like most isn’t shown in the above screenshot but the ‘8 Reasons Why You’ll Love Vanilla’ grid design is wonderful. It’s engaging on it’s own and leaves me wondering why the entire site doesn’t play this particular design portion up more.

We’ve featured uptrending.com before, and as always the designs are good. I think this is one of the best so far, I love the simplification of the content displayed on the home page. Keeping it clear and easy to digest, that’s the trick right? I also like that the design resists making elements animated for no real reason, it’s largely static but it’s still very nice. Proving you don’t always need to make something wiggle or fade to be a well designed site.

I love personal/professional websites like this one. Places where web professionals put up work samples and blog posts side by side. Often they are projects that are worked on just for fun, it normally shows in a good way. There’s some interesting design things going on with this design, the half face half computer imagery at the top of the site is a nice little visual thought. I think the typography could stand to be simplified a bit on the overall layout, there feels like there may be too much going on. Overall though, pretty nice looking site.

Forty has a great blog post with pictures that detail the process. Technically they post that:

The entire site was built in HTML 5, the next major revision of HTML, and implemented in the Expression Engine content management system.

The design has a nice balance of clean, open space and imagery. The colors are of course red, white & blue but what do you expect? There are some nice things happening when it comes to fine detail work on this site too, like down in bottom area of the site and the far right 3rd column. The typography gives it a nice soft feel too, something McCain’s brand might need more of, so that’s a great direction to take the design in. It’s neat to see the main focus of the site’s content be centered around the blog posts, that may be standard fare for political sites these days but it is a departure from tradition in this field of websites.

The thing about political candidate websites for me is that I love to see how different designers handle the struggle with visual hierarchy from section to section (specifically talking about home pages for political sites.) This one has the same issues as say Obama’s presidential election site did (or any large news site for that matter, like CNN.com or something), wherein you have all this content that you need to get onto the page and normally have a set of big honkin’ pictures you need to place high up on the page physically, just like with this one. I think the McCain site handles the hierarchy of information pretty well. This site is also another great example to use when you need to explain to a client that a scrolling website isn’t the devil.

The thing I like most about this website is it’s content architecture. Go through the site one good time and you’ll notice there’s not a straight up sub navigation, the content is all integrated into the flow/experience of using the website. You don’t even miss the sub nav. I mean they have navigation elements on pages where it’s needed, when it’s needed but overall you just feel like you “flow” through the content naturally. And that’s not easy to achieve.

I also have a note from Sunny Thaper at Forty Agency about the project:

Just a quick note that the entire effort was not just Forty, but a couple of companies. If it’s cool, I’d like to list them out real quick (also note, all these are local AZ companies):

Ovo: brandsbyovo.com
Deru: deru.net
Sorenson Media: sorensonmedia.com
ExpressionEngine: expressionengine.com (CMS)
DevFu: devfu.com (helped with the home page rotator)

And a quick shout-out to Corey Vale and Jeremy Vaught from the McCain headquarters for working very closely with us and keeping an open mind about what is possible in the political campaign space.

Kudos on a great site design.

Relaunch of Electric Pulp’s website. Often imitated but never reproduced, they created one of my favorite websites with their past design and with this relaunch they’ve continued with that same theme. The background image is immaculate and I love the feel the type has, feels like it’s been ‘wood burned’ into the wood. The simple grid makes the site feel clean even though they have the wood image and most of it feels a bit grungy and hand made looking. The blog is also rather nice with the way it treats the different types of posts.

Line based and really feels like a classic design firm type website. I love it. Reminds me a lot of Khoi Vinh’s Web Site, subtraction.com a lot on the sub pages. Probably just the strong black lines doing that. I really like this home page, the random feeling to images in the grid but yet clearly there is a stated structure to it all.

Really cool, single page site. I like the fixed header on this site and the large images of the design samples with the smaller ones worked on top of them like that look really nice. The type is at times a little too thin and difficult to read given the low contrast areas of the design, but the texture is nice. There are also some nice little surprises in the design like the slanted text in the main tagline box and the ‘old school’ icon set is just badass!

Designfruit exclusive unmatchedstyle brush giveaway. 38 royalty free brushes.

Download the brushes here (13.9 mb)

Dan Spencer and Jason Gaylor at Designfruit.com (@designfruit) have offered up a set of 38 royalty free Photoshop brushes for the unmatchedstyle community to use. Designfruit provides high-quality digital and real-world designs in the form of Photoshop brushes, vectors, vinyl wall art, prints and other design goods in a range of themes including foliage, patterns, borders, vines, and tattoos; all royalty-free. The images here are some quick examples of what they look like. They are free, so go snag ‘em. Do us a favor though and submit back your designs if you happen to use them somewhere. We’d love to see what you do with them.

Designfruit’s original illustrations have been on the cover of Digital Scrapbooking Magazine and featured in multiple magazines, including Photoshop, Computer Arts, Digital Scrapbooking, and Simple Scrapbooks. They have appeared on many different media including, Blue Man Group merchandise, H&M shirts, Sunkist and 7up cans, Chevrolet ads, PBS ads, Hewlett Packard design templates, FLOR tile samples, a network show package for the Versus Channel and the Eastern Promises movie trailer.

Thanks Dan and Jason for your hard work on these!

Wow. I was a little overwhelmed and confused at first when I came to this site but then I was compelled to explore it more. I’m amazed by all the different infographics and the sheer amount of information they convey - some in ways I would have never thought of which in turn, makes you think of that information differently. All of this attention to the organization of information/data makes me think that this would have been a really interesting and informative conference on a subject that could have otherwise been equal to my college stat class - boring.

I think my favorite part is the maps because of how simply they provided their users with so much useful information. As far as the homepage and my initial confusion, I suggest a simple hover over the elements with a clear title.