I love browsing websites from design showcases and thinking why did they make it there. And I have my own criteria for choosing the best of the best:
- design must communicate an idea or story, not design itself
- if you follow trends, think about details, that make you unique
- adapt navigation, layout, typography, colors to boost impact of your design. Horizontal top navigation is very usable, but in some cases you can find a more effective way of visualizing information
- be different on purpose, make a statement when you need one, have a reason for being restrained. Blue jeans and white shirt may look stunning too.
- use technology creatively – if one can draw a dragon in photoshop, then there certainly must be a way to make it fly from the browser. You can do better than parallax!
- personal sympathy and fascination – those *!?, how *!? did they do it?
So take a look at some of my favourites from the last year.
Three typefaces, three different characters and use cases in a single web page. Looks like a fashion on a catwalk – you see it, you want to have it all in your closet.
Why do you watch TV? Because the images in it move. What will make you lurk long hours online in the next year? Right, moving images! Here is a perfect combination of typography stolen from restaurant boards, mix-n-match illustration and a pinch of humour. You can zoom it in, you can zoom it out, you can have it lite, you can have it awesome. Cheers!
So simple, yet so visual.
Zombie movies are great. HTML5 zombie animation is even better. Steal the comics idea, while it’s fresh.
http://www.cabletv.com/the-walking-dead
I wish my history textbooks were like this. You can skim the text, you memorize images, you can check the tooltips.
Because it gives a hint on navigation. I’ve seen elsewhere and I guess it will become trendy.
Video backgrounds are a cool trend. If you have a restaurant, video is a great way to tell your customers about the atmosphere, delicious fresh foods – these things are hard to capture with words or in simple pictures. Also, if gifs are being revived now, most probably video things will gain more impact in the near future.
http://www.brindisatapaskitchens.com/
http://fairlypainless.com/index.html
Here you have a story told. Do you remember your teacher telling you “Write the same thing in conclusion as was in introduction, just in other words”. So they used the same trick. Maybe not a very outstanding piece, but illustrates story telling well.
This one I love for creative navigation.
+1!!!