Today’s post highlights the design of BlakeAllenDesign.com (he works at Paramore Redd featured earlier in this series). Striking typography, precise grid and spartan duotone color palette create an impressive and memorable experience. The content is arranged in two major columns broken into multiple sections surrounded by heavy oversized headers. The outline of a walking man which highlights the “exploration” part of the site motto is the only non-typographical element. Note how all the other logo elements are typography-based (including the fully expanded Twitter logo and cleverly arranged “Ba Design” logo that is inspired by the layout of periodical table of chemical elements).

Also note the exact layout of subcolumns in the “portfolio” and “awards” sections, the precise horizontal alignment of “about” and “awards” sections, as well as absence of any white rivers in the rather large “about” section.

Focusing mainly on typography, the design loses a little bit of interactive appeal when browsing the portfolio section. Clicking on a portfolio link shows a rather large slideshow of the related work. Unfortunately each portfolio section has a separate URL and is not replaced dynamically. This means that if you scroll down the page to reveal the full vertical extent of the slideshow, and then click on a different portfolio link, you lose your vertical position in the page. Since the transitions of images in the same slideshow are done with nice animations, i would expect a better UX for switching between different portfolio parts.