Design, uninterrupted #150

February 28th, 2011

Today’s post highlights the design of Kapepur.com by Greenhouse Studio. A light-on-dark design uses a warm color palette of peach red, light gray, dark brownish gray and tangy yellow; the later is used for both hyperlinks and section headers leading to somewhat unpredictable browsing expectations. Rich vignette illustration elements contribute to the warm feel, from the oversized logo to separators to the stippled drawing of a coffee tree. The header seems slightly off balance (to the left) – the tree illustration is too “anemic” to balance out the heavy tagline, big logo and the background map. There’s also some work needed to align and balance content in the footer to use more consistent typography and alignment. Finally, while the embedded flickr widget adds a nice splash of color, it feels that the social icons (twitter / facebook) need to be stylized with one of the palette colors; the cyans / blues are too bright and distracting.