Best site designs?

Dave!

Hey folks,

I'm not sure if there's already a thread about this (there probably is), but I've spent the last few days (between doing actual productive things!) looking around at various websites for some inspiration There's some great designs out there.

Let's leave aside most of CSS Zen Garden's designs

eg. Mark Boulton's website
http://www.markboultondesign.com

I also love this one
http://twistedintellect.com


Isn't white space great???

Dave!

Oh here's a couple I forgot about

http://www.subtraction.com

I love this
http://www.misterpresident.org

kgpixels

Flash used to its full!

http://www.leoburnett.ca/FLASH/index.htm

Liam Byrne

kgpixels wrote: »

Flash used to its full!

http://www.leoburnett.ca/FLASH/index.htm

Class site to "play" with, but I had no idea what the site was about from the home page, it's pretty difficult to navigate, and I still have no idea what "big black pencil" actually do!

RobertFoster

And it resizes my browser window, so I've even less chance of knowing what it's about as I've closed the tab already.

Dave!

This site uses Flash a bit more delicately to great effect

http://www.whitenoisestudios.com

HandWS LTD

Also, Mark Boulton's website says they design websites but it consists of errors. Thats not good for anyone who plan to design websites as a service.

Pixelcraft

It's going through a re-design so that's probably why. The site though is still well coded and perfectly accessible. Seriously, Mark Boulton's one of the best designer's around, and has been designing for a long time. I don't think any of us here are in a position to criticise his work.

HandWS LTD

Hi pixel.....you are prob right about that. I'm not critising him as a designer but the errors he has. Didn't think it could be a redesign.

I'll look again in a few months.

Dave!

Hey folks, just wanted to bump this because I think it'd be good to have a thread to post good designs and perhaps critique them! I'm looking for inspiration and am always looking around at sites, particularly portfolios, for good techniques and the likes.

Feel free to post up more! I've a few bookmarked on the laptop, so will post some myself later

Dean820

Jim Carrey has the most flashiest website known to man:

http://www.jimcarrey.com/

titan18

http://www.2advanced.com/

I find this site to be quite cool

Abelloid

I really don't like Flash... not sure why, but I'm instantly turned off sites that rely on it..

I do like this -

http://benthebodyguard.com/

anbrutog

Good thread.

I find Creattica to be a fantastic resource myself , some wonderful stuff there...

http://creattica.com/

Lostinspace

Hi OP,

I find that Web Creme is excellent. You could spend hours looking through it.

http://www.webcreme.com

anbrutog

Lostinspace wrote: »

Hi OP,

I find that Web Creme is excellent. You could spend hours looking through it.

http://www.webcreme.com

Never heard of that one , some great stuff there!

Vurnon San Benito

Never mind flash.
Look at Chris Pearson's website. Truly class.

http://www.pearsonified.com/

lil_lisa

This is a fun design:

www.oddodesign.com

(Although I personally love it just for the bus!)

TitoPuente

Doocey wrote: »

Never mind flash.
Look at Chris Pearson's website. Truly class.

http://www.pearsonified.com/

It's a pretty standard looking WordPress blog. Nothing special there whatsoever IMO.

desaparecidos

All of these supposedly good designs are nothing more than pointless glossy brochures, which would fall on their arse if applied to a data centric real world website.

lil_lisa

desaparecidos wrote: »

All of these supposedly good designs are nothing more than pointless glossy brochures, which would fall on their arse if applied to a data centric real world website.

This thread has absolutely nothing got to do with the data/databases in a website, how it processes/sorts data or even whether its functional in any way or not. This is about design. I think if you want to discuss the architecture of a website then maybe you should start another thread about it.

Pixelcraft

desaparecidos wrote: »

All of these supposedly good designs are nothing more than pointless glossy brochures, which would fall on their arse if applied to a data centric real world website.

That's like saying my car would be crap if it was used as a bus.

Dave!

This is pretty awesome

http://www.copterlabs.com/

Liam Byrne

Dave! wrote: »

This is pretty awesome

http://www.copterlabs.com/

Have to say I hate it. The "broken-up" font is hard to read, and the site has far too little whitespace. The "enlarge on rollover" screenshots aren't z-indexed properly, appearing "under" each other, and the enlargement viewer is bog-standard.

The headers in the blog don't give you any idea that they are links (ironic considering the topic of the first blog entry)

Add in that the navigation jumps you around the place and I would have to say that that's a site that I'd rate very, very poorly.

Dave!

Yeah, but besides all that stuff...

Dave!

Few good ones linked to here

http://www.myinkblog.com/2009/03/21/4-principles-of-good-design-for-websites/

Dave!

I love this one

http://www.mailchimp.com/

EIREHotspur

US websites are great cool design I think.

abc.com
nbc.com
fox.com
nfl.com

Lostinspace

www.glenilen.com and www.tearoundapp.com are beautiful websites

shrewd

is http://www.webcreme.com down?

Dave!

Nope

Try http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com in future

pfurey101

The full flash websites are indeed gorgeous but I hope the owners are not depending on their websites to bring them visitors/customers. The search engines wont find them. Then again they probably have huge PPC budgets.

Jim Carrey's site is the biz, well suits his ego

Bonavox

I personally love Matt Brett's site. Excellent use of colour and fonts:

http://mattbrett.com/

Mike_Eile

This tops my list:

http://cure.org

Dave!

Bump

This one is outstanding
http://www.cacaotour.com/

Can't get enough of the contact form at the bottom! *droooooollll*

edit

Oh, and did I mention that it's responsive as f*ck?! Resize your browser there

One Flew Over

I love this site for it simplicity, use of white space with blocks of colour and it's user accessibility.

http://www.segd.org

S.M.B.

Dave! wrote: »

Bump

This one is outstanding
http://www.cacaotour.com/

Can't get enough of the contact form at the bottom! *droooooollll*

edit

Oh, and did I mention that it's responsive as f*ck?! Resize your browser there

Not a fan of that site at all.

There's a lot of completely unnecessary design elements in there that would put me off using it.

Fanny Cradock

Dave! wrote: »

Bump

This one is outstanding
http://www.cacaotour.com/

Can't get enough of the contact form at the bottom! *droooooollll*

edit

Oh, and did I mention that it's responsive as f*ck?! Resize your browser there

The form doesn't render the same in IE 7 or 8 and I reckon there is close to 10mb of background images to download on the home page alone.

Duncan1001011

I'd recommend allday.cc.

It's an excellent showcase of one of the lesser talked about aspects of web design: persuasive copy.

Your design isn't going to convert anybody of the copy was written by a stiff businessman with no regard to the brands identity.

Placebo

whats copy got to do with web design?
You could have the best speech of the world on a really badly designed website, it may still read like the best speech in the world, but it will still be written on a brown paper bag found on the street

Duncan1001011

I think copy has a lot to do with web design. Would allday.cc really work as a design if it didn't have top notch copy?

At the end of the day a web design is a frame for content. I actually think that a decent speech written on a paper bag would have a chance of doing down well. On the flip side however, the greatest design in the world is worth nothing if it is just there to present a wall of lorem ipsum.

Ideally both need to be taken into consideration to make a nice site. Both the content and design would benefit from working off each other.

Placebo

Duncan1001011 wrote: »

. Would allday.cc really work as a design if it didn't have top notch copy?

Honestly, i feel that site is badly designed. So to me it wont make a difference.
However even if it was the best site in the world, the copy could be replaced with random 'Lorem ipsum' copy and it would still look good.

The type of writing, wether 'persuasive' or otherwise, to me, doesn't have any effect on design.

smash

allday.cc.... min €250 daily rate to write copy? Isn't that what marketing teams are for?

And sure he didn't create his website, http://youloveus.co.uk/ did.

Duncan1001011

However even if it was the best site in the world, the copy could be replaced with random 'Lorem ipsum' copy and it would still look good.

I think this is where we are differing. I'm figuring that design is solving problems. To convert more users into paying clients for example. To solve this problem the end design may not look pretty, but if it does the job then it's a good design. Whether it looks pretty or not is superfluous. For example lingscars.com looks crap, but it's usable and I'm never going to forget the site. I've seen it posted on just about every top "bad design" list, it's probably gotten a lot more attention that any other online car shop by looking like such crap.

My point is that design is for solving problems, not making things look pretty. You simply can't achieve anything with a site full of lorem ipsum.

allday.cc.... min €250 daily rate to write copy? Isn't that what marketing teams are for?

If you have a marketing team with competent writers then sure. I'm not sure what his target market is exactly.

And sure he didn't create his website, http://youloveus.co.uk/ did.

Sorry, I'm new here, is this thread specifically for self made sites or something? I didn't mean to imply that he did.

tricky D

I would have thought it was pretty obvious that copywriting has plenty to do with design. Copy is a functional aspect of a website which inputs into the form of the design. Take a look at so many websites with their walls of text on homepages which is a poor way to handle the content. A good web copywriter knows that you generally start with easily digestible snippets and than progress to longer bits of text as the user's interest and attention level rises. The site cited does that with the first 2 pages having copy of about 25 words, then 3 paras of 25 each and then the fuller sell. This reflects the increasing level of interest, though I'm not a fan of how it has been executed into the design form. I doubt that the site wasn't solely created by youloveus, Mr Allday obviously had significant input, possibly beyond just the copy. I don't think his day rate is any issue and what the marketing Dept should be doing and actually do is another matter.

There's a nice article which covers all this with links to further reading: http://uxmyths.com/post/718187422/myth-you-dont-need-the-content-to-design-a-website including using Lorem Ipsum stuffing.

@Duncan, have a look at what Ling has written on this site - interesting stuff. She even did an 'In the Well' http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055793398

smash

Duncan1001011 wrote: »

You simply can't achieve anything with a site full of lorem ipsum.

Nobody said you could. Lorem Ipsum is placeholder text to show a client what their design will look like when copy is added. A designer's job is to create a design, not copy. Therefore copy has nothing to do with design, it's to do with the end result. The two are different. A well designed site should still look well with dummy text.

Dave!

Strange angle this thread has taken... I follow alot of design blogs and aggregators, and read a few books, and have never seen mention of copy as being an important aspect of design. Typography certainly, but not copy... As mentioned, it should look just as good with Lorem Ipsum.

desaparecidos

Length (word count) of copy matters, not the words themselves (except maybe for large titles).

smash

desaparecidos wrote: »

Length (word count) of copy matters, not the words themselves (except maybe for large titles).

Length of copy can be controlled by formatting and styling/features of it's parent container.

Dave!

This is probably a matter for another thread - keep posting sexy designs! With or without nice copy

Duncan1001011

@tricky D That's a nice link, cheers.

@ Dave! Good point Here's a nice site.
good****ingdesignadvice.com

*lol, boards edited the obscenity in the URL. It's goodfu ckingdesignadvice.com/
Without the space.

This one has a nice contact page.
peacock.st/