Today’s post highlights the design of HarropDesigns.com by Jason Harrop. The eye is immediately drawn to the picture of a bright-red Ferrari with an extra contrast provided by muting all the colors of the cars behind it. The inclination to use strong colors is seen everywhere on the page – from the portfolio thumbnail grid down to the link strip in the footer. The design features translucent overlapping textured layers, fading bezel separators and very attractive rollover animations (move the mouse over the navigation menu and the portfolio thumbnails).

Given that almost the entire content fits above the fold, it would be nice to see a more consistent grid alignment of visual elements. While the navigation menu sits nicely above the main illustration (and plays off of the bright red with the slightly desaturated orange), the content is rather haphazardly aligned – from five columns in the secondary navigation to uneven subcolumns in the bottom half to the extra wide footer link strip that partially extends under the “My news” thumbnails.