Inspirational Design Sites
The first site I came across that I enjoyed looking over for research in my project was LightMix Design Studio based out of Washington D.C. I thought their site looked very professional and had a nice feel to it. They used a few shades of gray, white, and orange as the primary colors on their website. I like, and have been planing on incorporating, a “news” section on my site. They have a news section but I think they should have moved it to a separate page, only so to shorten the home page. Under the portfolio button on the main navigation you can review case studies, identity design (logos, branding, etc.), as well as see a lot of other work they are involved in, including interface designing and print. They also included a “testimonials section” which I think is something potential clients would be very interested in
The next sight that caught my attention was LA Design Studio. The sight had some really cool visuals and had some great flash programming. That being said, I think the sight was more built around showing the cool things they could do with flash then anything else. The site is basically a moving landscape of a hill overlooking Los Angeles with a menu on the top right which calls up various flash objects to hover over the landscape. They have a lot of examples of their previous work in print, web design, logos, and photography (I thought being able to drag the pictures in the gallery was pretty cool). But beyond that they do not have more than 3-4 paragraphs of content which I imagine makes SEO difficult for them. Also, after you have been on the site for a while, the landscape turns from day to night. This site had some very cool effects and flash programming, but I don’t think that I would actually design my site this way. Maybe just use something similar to their photo gallery.
The last site that I perused was Gravitate Design Studio. Their sight had a nice simple look to it. It had a very two tone simple white and grey background with hovering frames for the content which allow the eye to flow easily. They include enough content and information about themselves and their previous projects, without getting too wordy or preachy. Their target demographic seems to be small businesses, artists, and non-profit organizations. The graphics are very basic, as well as the colors, which is easy on they eye. Their sight is easy to navigate with contextual menus on the left side. One section that I though was interesting was their “methodology section” in which they take you through the 4 major phases they go through when working with a client. In this section they mention some practices we learned about in Info. Arch. which personally give me confidence that they have a good grasp on web development and user centered design.
airimpact said,
February 10, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Some nice finds there, I think all three site’s where very cool. They all seemed to use typography very well. All the headings where in the same type and they were also different from the content that was under them. And they didn’t just stick to on font type and they also executed the bold and italics of the type, made it not look plain.
Mary Ann Byerly said,
February 11, 2009 at 5:38 pm
We actually looked at the same websites. I thought the LightMix site was too busy. I loved the effects LA design studio. I bet that gets them a lot of business. I liked the simple, professional graphics in the Gravitate site.
rmspencer said,
February 23, 2009 at 9:36 pm
i really liked the lightmix look. all the information is crammed packed close so im not having to go to , too many places for the information. but the colors on the la design intrigue me.
Pol46 said,
October 22, 2009 at 6:20 am
Are you saying I’m only here for the emo? ,
Coder14 said,
October 23, 2009 at 5:09 am
Ken-First of all, sorry for the disc! ,