Today’s post highlights the design of Retinart.net by Alex Charchar. A beautiful duotone color palette and precise vintage illustrations are combined with vignette floral header pattern and worn out separators to recreate a feel of an antique manuscript. There’s not a single weak spot left – from precise typography to ample line spacing, from tinted blue hyperlinks to perfectly arranged metadata sections of individual entries to the absolutely gorgeous contact form.
Over the past 6 years I’ve hosted a number of my open-source projects on Java.net. Over the last two-three years the site admins kept talking about moving the hosting forward, enhancing both the visual and the backend functionality of the site. I have no insight into the complexity of the existing infrastructure and the amount of resources available. It thus thus be foolish – and pointless – to speculate on the reasons for the glacial pace at which things are happening.
After a lot of promises, early November brought the rather hostile announcement (emphasis mine):
This is an opt-in migration – we have thousands of junk, test, and abandoned projects on the site and we intend to leave them behind. Any project owner can request that we move their projects, and any community leader can request that we move specific projects in the community. Any project that is not specifically requested by name via the opt-in form by November 30, 2010 will be purged when the CollabNet site goes dark. We will be keeping tarballs of the CollabNet contents and will be able to distribute them after the site goes dark, however projects that request migration are our top priority.
Aptly named “Move it or loose it“, this is quite a threatening statement that makes not one, not two, but three direct references to the projects that will not opt-in to the migration. Even though i’ve put the development and maintenance of my projects on hold, i still want to have the sources, binaries, documentation and the source history available for interested developers. And so i promptly added all my projects to the opt-in form.
Fast forward three weeks after the deadline date. A couple of days ago a comment was left on my blog (thanks Eugene) – Substance look-and-feel is nowhere to be found. It’s no longer at substance.dev.java.net and certainly not on the new java.net/projects. Let’s look at my new profile page that lists some of the projects that i asked to migrate. Looks like java.net/projects/substance is the winner, except that it leads to an error page. Most of the project links on my profile page lead to errors, and some lead to the subset of the original content. Every page takes minutes to load, and i have no idea if the old forum postings and binaries will ever make it through. Top priority indeed.
So here’s the deal. Over the next few days i will upload all the sources, documentation and additional materials to my GitHub page. However, it will be up to you to build the binaries, run sample applications and browse the downloaded documentation. I simply don’t have time to untangle this horrible migration mess that was unilaterally forced on me and my users.
And yes, i know that Java.net was a free service, and that the same exact thing may happen to GitHub in five years. I’m not that naive.
Today’s post highlights the design of ShapingThePage.com. The light blue background of the main section is further accentuated by irregular blobs floating in the background to evoke the illusion of summer northern skies. The content is laid out in three columns with the auto-advance portfolio ticker dominating the top part of the page. I like the usage of dark turquoise for the hyperlinks, but the testimonial blurbs set in white foreground with barely discernible drop shadow are not very readable – neither in italics nor in all caps. Hand drawn illustration style is evident elsewhere on the page – from the rough sketched doodles behind the social links in the footer to the oversized illustration with an elephant with peanuts on its mind (move the mouse over). Browse other pages to see additional paper-fold animal illustrations (bird, butterfly and kangaroo).
Today’s post highlights the design of MadeMyDay.de by Marc Hinse. Taking a step away from conservative visual elements, the bold oversized orange textured circle creates a memorable first impression, without being too gawdy or unbalanced. You can find additional circular elements elsewhere on the main page, with the same rough wall texture binding them together. The color palette spans orange, dark bottle green, aquamarine, desaturated light blue and sand yellow – a vintage feel that works quite well with the embedded Graublau font used for most of the text sections. I particularly like the inverted styling of hyperlinks that matches the narrow glyphs and creates a nice visual balance with oversized section headers.
