This is the website that I took a lot of my inspiration from for project two in GUI this semester. It is the website for a small design studio in Wisconsin, America, founded by designer, Tracy Apps.
The thing that I like the most about this site is how different it looks. It is so refreshingly unique. It is fun and really promotes the designer/company’s style.
The moment you open the website, you are immediately drawn to the colourful swirls in the top right hand corner. This is surrounded by colourful gradient “rays” that really add light to the rest of the site, which is a dark brown. This entire area is absolutely beautiful and acts like a light to the rest of the site. It is not heavy or overbearing. This is surrounded with a very unique menu, which follows the general curved shape of the swirls. This makes the site a little more interesting than most, but it is still easy to find – it really stands out against the background with relatively large text.
This makes navigation around the site very easy – there are only 5 main pages and on each page, the menu stays the same and in the same position so one doesn’t have to keep looking around to find it. The rest of the site is also like this – most elements stay in the same place. This is a very simple solution to a website, but it works very well. It seems that all unnecessary content and elements have been taken out, which is really good.
Again, rather unconventionally, the logo is positioned at the bottom right half of the page, and is locked onto it, so when one resizes the window, it moves with the bottom – it doesn’t disappear. The logo has its own space and also brings in the swirly and colourful elements from the rest of the site, so it draws a lot of attention.
The homepage of this site has been done well – the content takes up most of the page, but is surrounded by a lot of open space. It has an inspirational design quote that frames what can be assumed to be one of their most recent projects. Below this is a short description of the company and a link to get a “free consultation”. I think that this is really well done – all the content that a viewer could really want to see what the company is about is available straight away, in a clean and clear layout.
When moving the mouse over menu items, a small image appears and the text changes colour – this is really effective and lets the user know what they are doing and where they are. The only thing I could think of to improve this would be to keep the image there or the changed colour when the user has navigated to that page, so that if they have scrolled down a lot in a certain page and look over at the menu, they can still see immediately where they are, instead of having to scroll back up to check the title.
I also think that on the portfolio page a lightbox effect could have been employed to display their work. Instead, their work seems to have been organized in a blog with images, videos and a fair amount of text.
Another issue with the site is that when you re-adjust the window size, you can lose a lot of content. For example, if the window is too small (whether it has been adjusted to this size or was already the default setting), content can be obstructed with the logo or menu.
Overall, I really love how simple this site is. All irrelevant information has been taken out. I also love the colours and the playfulness of the design. I think that this site very effectively promotes the design company who made it.
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