Today’s post highlights the design of Pop-The-Box.com (@Pop_the_Box) by Dash Station (@dashstation). It’s an instantly memorable and easily recognizable site that opts for placing all the content above the fold, horizontally scrolling between the four sections on changing selection in the navigation menu. While the content of each section is rather spartan, it is framed with exquisitely crafted textile background textures; my favorite visual element by far is the interlocking repeating plaid pattern of vintage greens, yellows and grays.
The warm intricacy of thick curvy Lobster and the simplicity of all-caps traditional Underground look great on the grainy denim texture of the large gray content box. The embroidered main logo completes this great specimen of an elegant, well balanced and excellently styled modern design.
Every month this series is tracking the latest design trends and collecting the best examples of modern web designs. Here is the list for February 2011 with over 700 links from 27 aggregator posts:
Today’s post highlights the design of WordRefuge.com by EctoMachine. February must be the “Peach Red month” on this series, with this design joining ImageMechanics.com.au, ShellyCooperDesign.com and Kapepur.com for splashes of vivid, vibrant and warm color offsetting a reserved vintage color palette of worn out yellow, faded brown and dark gray. The retro look is reinforced with background textures, heraldic icon (with a few irregularly “colored” pixels), a large stippled drawing in the promo section and an elaborate wax seal rendition of the feed icon in the footer. The transition to footer is clearly delineated by the thick red section with a drop shadow along its top edge. Note how this color is used for everything related to contacting / social interaction with the agency – from the big “get a quote” ribbon in the header to the twitter / rss decorations in the footer.
On a less positive side, the embedded fonts used in the site (serif Albertina with its slanted serifs on lower case letters and bulging Klavika) have poor baseline alignment, grid fitting and kerning. Trace the alignment and gaps on the section headers to see rather sloppy performance of the font, only some of which may be attributed to the Cufon library. Switching to fonts with better support for modern web typography will undoubtedly boost the overall visual appeal of this otherwise excellent nouveau-vintage design.
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.
