Today’s post highlights the design of PracticallyModern.com by Jesse Brew (recently featured in the Retro:Active series). The site takes you on a fascinating visual journey that features meticulously chosen images and a great color palette. With only minimal text content for every entry, the main focus is on exploring the visuals that surround us – taken through a retro lens. The images are rich in soft natural browns, yellows, blues and greens, with only minimal incursion towards the red-violet spectrum. The predominant golden browns also form the basis of the supporting graphical elements – from the textured wooden bar in each entry header to brownish yellow links to the textured lead photograph in the site header.

The sidebar navigation is my favorite element here. While most sites resort to a simple bullet list of the recent entries, Jesse has crafted a vertical list of thin thumbnail slivers, each one showing a small visual glimpse of the matching entry. Given such strong reliance on images in the main content column it’s not surprising to see the same amount of visual polish that went into this bar. And finally, if i had to change one thing, i’d play with theming the facebook / twitter buttons, at least for the default state – the bright blues stick out like a sore thumb.