The Design Canopy

The Standards Reboot was a lot of fun, I’ve already written briefly about my experience, and for a little Friday fun I wanted to highlight some of my favorite sites from the reboot.

I decided to pick the top ten of my favorites, and out of that ten, the top three. To humor myself I’ve listed them from tenth to fourth in no particular order, and then third, second and first. So without further ado, the screen shots and commentary.

XHTML Slicer

I like the pattern in the header and the slicing-imitation graphic, clever and fun. The first paragraph tells me exactly what they do, and the slicing is reinforced with the scissor and dotted line graphic used for content separation.

Design Spectacle

This is a simple site, but unique and very well-executed. I like the use of serif fonts and the upside-down crowd at the top is neat.

Apathetic Conformity

I was attracted to this site because of the message scrawled on the wall in the header image. Photoshop? Maybe, but it seems real to me, cool picture and nice find if so. The site also implements sIFR very well.

Deny Sri Supriyono

The texture on this site makes me want to reach out and rub my screen; and I like the lamp at the lower left corner too. I appreciate the bold color schemes used for the front page and the blog.

WordPress Demo & Playground

There’s nothing too groundbreaking about this design, but it’s so well executed that it stayed in my top ten. It sports a superb drop shadow and corner ribbon graphic. The style switcher for screen, print and hand-held versions is a neat feature also.

Kosta Mijic

I took to this site immediately, the color scheme is inviting and the horizontal and vertical lines provide an effective rhythm to the presentation of the portfolio.

Intentionally

I like the cleanliness of this site and the no-frills content-flow. On the single posts, the image at the top of the sidebar corresponds with the associated category, nice touch.

Okay, here are the final three:

Third Favorite: Jason Julien

I could stare at those colorful swirly things all day! The portfolio presentation is neat, and addictive too; once you click on it you get engrossed and keep clicking through the slide show. It’s a great way to get people to view your work.

Second Favorite: University of Baguio - Science High School

This is a great design, and even greater when you consider it’s for a high school. Most high school websites are quite awful, but they probably have a much bigger budget than most public high schools. I really like the layout of the individual pages and how the sub-navigation is presented. The random graphics on the index page are well executed and give the site a warm personality.

Favorite: Playground Blues

I’ve already mentioned Playground Blues in the “Side Notes” part of the Notebook, I really dig the design and the content. The site is created with Django-which is extremely flexible when it comes to content management-and has allowed for the site author to really showcase his creativity. This is the site that has pushed me to the Django side of the fence when it comes to choosing which language framework to learn. Lastly, I love how it uses both a light and dark color scheme depending upon which section of the site you’re viewing. Really cool!

Well that concludes my favorites from this year’s Standards Reboot. Enjoy your weekend!