Today’s post highlights the design of TheDesignCubicle.com by Brian Hoff (whose personal site was featured in this series a few weeks ago). A popular white / black / brick red color palette gets two additional colors – yellow for header, sidebar and footer highlights / rollovers, and light blue for main body hyperlinks. While the design uses consistent hyperlink and rollover colors in each section, there is a negative element when the visitor decides what is a link – four different colors are used for hyperlinks (white, yellow, light blue and black).
The main content is framed by two thing black strips on top and bottom, and two thicker brick red strips on the side. Note the simple patterned gutter strips running along the sides, as well as the muted pinstripe textures extending from the sides of the main header and footer section – creating subtle separation of the main content area. The center column is divided in four parts, with subtle linear grayscale gradients to separate between them. Clean typography, precise line spacing and smaller fonts on secondary elements (metadata, social links, categories) create a pleasant reading experience even giving the large amounts of text paragraphs.
Image by bookgrl
Every month this series is tracking the latest design trends and collecting the best examples of modern web designs. Here is the list for August 2010 with over 1800 links from 55 aggregator posts:
Today’s post highlights the design of SweetSallies.com. With a soothing background palette of teal and light aquamarine, and splashes of olive brown for the texts, it uses a repeating floral pattern to create a friendly and playful vibe. The main page content is laid out in a narrow two-column grid that is framed to look like a real-life menu (with drop shadows elevating it above the background).
A lot of attention has been spent to fit all the essential information into a relatively small grid. The menu sections in the right column are interactive. Clicking on day names smoothly expands the relevant subsection, and moving the mouse over each menu entry (cupcakes and coffee) fades in a slightly translucent overlay with more information – all using the same teal color found in the header section.
The playful flowery theme is reinforced with multiple elements – woven chains in the header, vignettes around the main logo, hand-written fonts used on the logo, navigation menu elements and horizontal separators between the left-column information sections. Overall a very inviting and warm impression.
My son and daughter taking a walk in the forest
