Today’s post highlights the design of AdelleCharles.com. Everything in the posture – from shoulder tilt to slight turn of the head to the actual eye shift – guides the visitor’s eye immediately towards a simple and well-balanced tagline that uses a custom hand-written font for the name and a thin slanted serif for the short description. Note how the shoulder tilt contributes to restoring the visual balance “disturbed” when the picture was move to the right of the center in order to make room for the tagline block.

Tastefully laconic, the rest of the site features duo-tone social links (with full color versions on rollover), a smooth expand / collapse transition on clicking the Contact and Credit links (along with cross fading the content while the extra strip is shown) and a simple link to the author’s blog. The duo-tone palette itself combines dark slate gray and light beige that borrow from the post-processed author picture. The beige serves as a natural surrounding of the face and hair, while the slate gray extends the dark blouse and the jacket.

This highly appealing combination of color, balance and visual guidance is unfortunately lost on the similarly themed sites of three other people behind Fuel Brand Inc. Joshua‘s glance towards the tagline looks quite apprehensive, Doug is not looking at the tagline at all, and Dan‘s picture looks blurry around the edges and is misaligned (the main tagline is projected at his forehead instead of at the eyes). The strong visual perception of Adelle’s picture is also out of place in the team section of the company’s site (where she is looking away from the other team members), as well as on her Twitter page (where she is looking away from the main content).