Image by julieboddy

Every month this series is tracking the latest design trends and collecting the best examples of modern web designs. Here is the list for July 2010 with almost 1200 links from 38 aggregator posts:

• 25 Beautiful Minimalist Websites – Part VIII from Vandelay Website Design
• 40 Tasty Restaurant Websites to Inspire You from Web Design Ledger
• 30+ Beautiful DIV/CSS Web Designs To Inspire You from DJDESIGNERLAB
• Showcase Of Web Design In Poland from Smashing Magazine
• 30 Creative E-Commerce Designs from WebDesignFan.com
• Examples of Solid Colors in Web Design from DesignM.ag
• 50 Examples of Drop-Down Navigation Menus in Web Designs from Six Revisions
• 40 Inspiring Blog Designs from Web Design Ledger
• Tips and Inspiration on Creating a Great Website Footer from 1stwebdesigner – Love In Design
• Showcase of Well-Designed Banking and Investment Websites from Noupe
• 19 Impressive, Stunning and Simple Web Sites from Design Shard
• 12 Fresh Website That Uses Illustration from Orphicpixel
• 30 Examples of Excellent Website Navigation from Web Design Ledger
• Showcase of Sweet Chocolate Websites from Smashing Magazine
• A Collection of Splendid Illustrated Websites from Webdesigner Depot
• 58 Attractive CV/Resume Design Inspiration from Themeflash : One Stop For All Your Web Resources
• 20 Great Examples Of Icons In Navigation Design from Spyre Studios
• 40 Excellent Examples of Single Page Websites from Web Design Ledger
• 40 Beautiful and Creative iPad Application Websites from DJDESIGNERLAB
• 30+ Inspiring Website Navigation Menus from Naldz Graphics
• 50 Unique and Inspiring Website Designs from Onextrapixel
  
• Texture Used in Web Design: Examples, Best Practices, and How-To from Onextrapixel
  
• Paradise on the Web: Examples of Beautiful Hotel and Resort Websites from Inspiredology
• 35 Beautiful Web Designs Inspired by Nature from Vandelay Website Design
• An Analysis of Inspiring Portfolio Designs from PSDFan
• 10 Cool Web Design Portfolios from Web Design Tutorials
  
• 30 Awesome Custom Tumblr Blog Designs from Spyre Studios
• 10 Personal Minimalist Websites from Orphicpixel
• 25 Beautiful Travel and Tourism Websites from Vandelay Website Design
• 23 Design Inspiration Blogs worth visiting from PV.M Garage
• 30 killer designs from the Dribbble design community from PV.M Garage
• 25 awesome price graphs for your inspiration from PV.M Garage
• 50 Inspiring Examples of Texture in Web Design from Web Design Ledger
• Creative Single Page Website Design: 70+ Latest Designs from instantShift
• Showcase of Beautiful Restaurant Websites from DJDESIGNERLAB
  
• 10 More Graphic/Web Design Portfolios from Web Design Tutorials
  
• The Niceties & Standards of Real Estate Website Design from 1stwebdesigner
  
• Worldy Inspiration from Tourism Websites from Webdesigner Depot

Today’s post highlights the design of 204Beech.com by Geoff Teehan. A deceptively simple design weaves images and text to tell a story about designing a building a new house. Clever use of oversized leading images converted to a desaturated monochrome palette makes them feel an integral part of the design. Slightly desaturated translucent salmon red for image captures and highlights keep the site palette down to a minimum, while still adding a splash of color. The same salmon red is used consistently for the main logo, navigation menu highlights, links and the footer separator. It is a fascinating visual journey that keeps text paragraphs readable, adds helpful breaks inside long entries and maintains simplicity through consistent use of color, overlays and highlights.

Today’s post highlights the design of DavidHellmann.com. With plenty of white space around the elements and a strong alignment highlighted by the dash gridlines, the main page features a lot of material and links, including the portfolio thumbnails, snippets from the last articles and an oversized footer with elaborate illustrations. A rather unusual choice of using two different colors for links – dark red and dark teal (also used in the main logo) adds some visual noise to an otherwise consistent color palette. Even more noise is added by using saturated green as rollover color for “Check out the portfolio” and “Read more articles” buttons. Rollover effects are pervasive throughout the design – move the mouse over the main logo, portfolio thumbnails and the big “Top” arrow in the right side of the footer.

Today’s post highlights the design of EnlivenLabs.com. Set on the backdrop of dark olive denim texture, the site uses a earthen palette of brick red, golden brown and light ochre set early on in the decoration strip that runs along the top edge and applied consistently to all visual elements. The main emphasis is placed on large portfolio thumbnails that use beautifully crafted explanation boxes. Note how much visual attention went into the lighting model of the borders, drop shadows and depressed dash separators.

Irregular lighter spots in the background texture can hurt legibility even for larger font sizes, and the design address this issue by using darker drop shadows. The brick red color is used for two main design elements – the anchored navigation menu and the main action button. Move the mouse over the darker bird outline in the navigation menu vertical ribbon to see a full-color Twitter bird. A simple one-line footer completes this single page design.