Now, I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover and all that but I have a thing for well designed, easy to navigate and just, well, pretty websites.
What seems to be a product of recent years and probably advances in technology, websites seem to look best nowadays when they’ve got nicely rounded pictures with a warm hazy glow about them. I’m not sure if anyone will understand exactly what I’m trying to convey so maybe it’s best summed up by the glorious artform of picture.
So, I was looking up decent blogging sites and landed on the wonderfully user friendly and just as pretty Tumblr (no disrespect to WordPress who’s forté lies in the unique posting interface)
The lovely Tumblr homepage
Keeping to the same theme is Vimeo, the web’s best kept video secret, loved by artsy types and clever people who produce masterpieces of animation and film work. I’m a bit of a sucker for nicely designed Flash sites (ahh, if only I knew how to use it!) and this is a nugget of Flash gold. I love the childlike, happy, innocent feel which I think perfectly represents the site’s image.
The joyful world of Vimeo
A favourite site of mine was for a little coffee shop chain in and around the South West and South Wales: Coffee #1. I know that the guys behind this website were paid a good amount for generating it and I thought it was a cool, but effective Flash site that really delivered. Unfortunately, the site I’m talking about has had a bit of a revamp and is no longer as visually pretty as it used to be!
I’m not really sure myself what it is about these websites that are so appealing - maybe it’s the Flash aspects that are common to some or the shadowed texts. I also really like the bright, happy-go-lucky colour schemes with a bit of flair behind them. Kudos to whoever designed these little gems on an internet so full of dull, mediocre and badly navigated text sites.
Hopefully in the not-so-distant future I’ll uncover some more brilliantly designed sites to impress you all with.
