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!

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.

Really simple “old school” looking design. I like that a lot about this site, the grid is nice with the images worked into it in such interesting ways. There’s not much here aside from the work samples and that’s okay when they look so good.

This conference has a great brand which has been translated into a great website and they’ve even thought of a lot of small places to implement it like in their video, loading screen, favicon, a mobile version of the site - and even the send button on the contact form!

I’m loving the foil texture of the background. The design tends to have a cool and crisp feel to it with the blue and silver background - highlighted by small lines marking off most edges. I also like the easy organization of their event calendar with the large dates at the top. They had to go off-site for the ticket selling page but continued the brand over as much as possible which was not a bad transition.