Soulwire

Most of what I have shared on this site have been websites that are exemplary for their designs, or for creatively demonstrating technical difference in the web field. Today, I am highlighting Justin Windle, both a creative and technical innovator of web technologies. He has worked for a number of big clients out of New York, but it is his personal catalog of experimentation that makes me feature him today.

Soulwire is a site built to greet anyone unfamiliar to Justin's work with a splash page, something I have long strayed from, but animated enough to give a truly warm introduction to his works. Animation is a central theme of everything done within his site, from the movement of his photo to the changing color of the frames when the page is changed, to the complicated experiments in his gallery. Each form of animation is a visual draw, highlighting just the right elements to encourage proper browsing of the site. Each page is also keyboard-friendly, allowing scrolling via the left-right keys. (Something that should be maybe a little more obvious on his site.) The experiments themselves however, are mind bogglingly impressive. Fully interactive and customizable physics-style engines designed explicitly for the web, content that makes all the tech guys scratch their heads, and all the designers look in awe.

You don't need a degree in animation to replicate what else makes Justin's work such an ideal site. Justin is networked. He has a twitter account, an rss blog operating out of his very site, a facebook, flickr, LinkedIn, visualize, DSPN, video, even a github and jsdo.it(something for the techies) account. On every page is the option to share his site with a number of social networking sites, and each page is enough of an innovation from the next, it's hard not to share them all. This versatility to implement easy networking capabilities on every page should be more than desirable for any designer. Plus the sheer number of accounts makes me question his daily sleep pattern. Bottom line, this is a site you must see to believe.

On Gummsig

Sorry for the delay in posting, better late than never. The site I'm featuring today is actually a site owned by a repeatedly accomplished webdesigner "gummisig" Guðmundur Bjarni Sigurðsson, whose works include the site for Ikea, Ingvar Helgason, and El Mundo. All of these sites have success, not only in hits and an attractive layout, but also within the coding itself. Look at his validation page, a full parsing which reveals the nature of every error imaginable. His sites have won awards, and is associated with AIGA, WSG, and e-Commerce.

Sadly, with all his background, I must criticize his lack of change. His color schemes and stark designs, while very much a product of Icelandic influence, no doubt, remain a product of the web 2.0 phenomenon. No efforts are made to break the mold, nothing is done out of the ordinary. But perhaps that is his strong point, he resonates with an older era of design, while updating the capablities of everything running in the background. He has updated with networking options and a full color background, as well as updates to his rss on the bottom of the page. But the site screams default for those of us who work in the industry. It would be interesting, however, to hear if you think the same. You can always comment to my twitter account.

Kunc & Dziedzic: Angles

There are standards for navigation these days. If there's a site built for mobile use, it's bound to use scrolling as its' primary function, for the web, dropdowns, or a bar of links on the top or left side of the screen. But that doesn't inherently mean a boring or staple design. Kunc & Dziedzic has shown what a drastic difference visual angles can make on the display of an interface. Strong photography and a clean mostly monotone color palette helps, but those angles really transforms something simple into something with style.

They aren't alone either. Blonde + Co Creative agency has had a site using an angled scroll that wraps around the page for years. They called it the infinity scroll, and it took so long to load it was barely worth the image based site's content. But Kunc & Dziedzic have standardized the angular process. Using all traditional transitions, the design is crisp and holds the same clarity as a vertical-horizontal plane. Designers tend to avoid angles specifically due to pixelation issues. 72dpi makes a line look off or blurry, but that doesn't make it weak. This is a good example of it being pulled off successfully, and with the frequency I see sites designed this way, it may be a while until I see one again.

Tim Roussilhe

Hello everyone, it's been almost a year since I last shared with you a fantastic new site on this blog, and I'm pleased to inform you that time is up. About two months ago a friend showed me a poster for Mad Men which I was intrigued by, and I sought out the original creator. Though I never made contact with the graphic artist, I did come across their site, which took me for a breathtaking multimedia experience. As you might have guessed, the designer was Timothy Roussilhe At first I considered it visually minimalist, following a simple three color scheme broken by a single large image that made up for the lack of color on the screen. But the animations that fed from one page of the site to the next demonstrated an understanding of motion attraction that is beyond superb.

It's not every day that I praise a designer's site, especially when competing in the same business myself. But nearly every action taken in that site has a visual, audible, and technically brilliant transition that is at the same time clean, minimal, and down to earth. It's a design that when shared with my colleagues was met with technical intrigue, but almost didn't notice the design itself. It is what I like to call an invisible design. Something so rooted in the basics of design construct that it reads as nothing more than the construct that holds information. Ease of use without being an eyesore, or becoming drab. It was never minimal. Just invisible. For a portfolio site he also uses a wonderful amount of humor in his text, which gives his whole site a certain charm. I strongly suggest taking a look if you aren't familiar with his work.