Today’s post highlights the design of Confab2011.com. A clean and easily scannable main page that uses a cool color palette of brick orange and desaturated cerulean to frame the navigation menu and 2*2 grid of speaker headshots (which is populated randomly on every page reload). Earthen yellows, greens and browns join the palette in the main icon and a multi-layered illustration of overlapping building outlines in the footer. This is a recurring visual element – not multiple decoration layers in the navigation menu and the bird illustration in the top-right corner.

On a less positive side, League Gothic from Typekit looks awkward on all-caps navigation menu entries, especially “REGISTER” with an oversized S in close proximity to a narrow G. Another example is “ABOUT CONFAB” with a lot of kerning issues in smaller font sizes. On a more positive side, enjoy smooth rollover animations on the speaker headshots and a little extra rollover effect on the stylized bird.