Today’s post highlights the design of KyleMKramer.com by @MrKyleKramer. The landing page has a nice vertical symmetry that mirrors the beige and slate gray sections around the large orange strip that highlights the designer’s portfolio. Note the visual rhythm that switches between intricate textures and flat beige fills, great typography that mixes embedded fonts with image-based oversizes text sections, and the consistent usage of double separator lines with variable stroke width.
And this is what i particularly like about this site – picking a very few elements and employing them consistently everywhere. You can see this in the three-color palette and the way it is used for styling the social icons and switching between light and dark text colors in the header and footer sections. You can see this in the grainy texture used in the portfolio section and the two round orange badges. You can see this in the edge patterns of the portfolio section and the badges – with the same thick slightly depressed outer edge and the lighter dashed seam running along the inner edge. You can see it in the layout and font styles employed in the three poster-style text blurbs in the beige sections – with exactly the same color treatment, text effects and the styling of the separators. And finally, you can see it in the visual treatment of social icons and the “hobby” icons in the two bottom sections – outer shape, icon styling and rollover effects. And while i’m talking about the last icon strip – this is definitely a unique flavor to the “about me” section, with single line snippets on Kyle’s hobbies, all nicely packaged and neatly tucked away, with simple and yet very effective jquery-based toggle effects.
A couple of weeks ago i posted a few screenshots of Gowalla 3 app for the Android platform, and today i want to take a closer look at the great work done by Drew Yeaton (designer, @xeeton) and Philip McAllister (developer, @mcalliph).
This screenshot illustrates the omnipresent header section. It starts with the thin rainbow strip that reinforces the web branding, transitioning into a combination of action bar and tab strip. Note how the single-pixel light gray separator just below the rainbow strip helps the transition from a full-color area into the predominantly monochrome section. Thin vertical icon lines fade away at the ends, providing just enough separation without too much visual noise. The icons themselves have a light halo offset one pixel to the bottom – this effect is mirrored on the text of selected tab. Together with the thin separator line mentioned above this establishes a consistent lighting model.
The selected tab has a nice subdued gradient that smoothly fades its fill into the action bar, with gradually darkening colors as it nears its bottom edge. Here, the design follows the same approach as taken by Safari 4.0 and Firefox 4.0 – both blend the currently selected tab into the address bar: Firefox downward and Safari upward. This is the right decision to make – while the header remains anchored to the top edge of the screen, the content is scrolled vertically below the tab strip; blending the selected tab into the content would have broken the visual continuity on both ends.
This screenshot shows the styling of pressed tabs. A pressed tab (bookmarks in this case) uses the same curvy contour as the selected one, with much darker gradient and the same color “flip” of the tab text.
And here you can see the styling of a pressed action bar button. Note how the gradient fill extends to the vertical separators on both sides (with some fuzziness along the right edge), with a much darker line along the top edge and a fade away towards the bottom. On a related note, the current version of the app does not show any visual indication of focus traversal making it rather hard to navigate the app with a nav ball, d-pad or any other navigation method.
As the information is loaded, the rightmost icon shows a spinning progress indicator. This follows the convention set by modern browsers that combine the opposite-state buttons to save valuable space while still providing visual indication of a running task.
Some pages show a button bar anchored to the bottom edge of the screen. Here, the main call-to-action button uses a strong orange fill, while still maintaining the global lighting model. Note how the button text has a darker shadow offset one pixel to the top. It also looks like the much darker gray color of the button bar background makes the outer dark orange line look fuzzy – this can be addressed, perhaps, by tweaking the colors used for the outer and inner contour along the bottom few pixels.
The button bar does not scroll away with the content. It looks like the designers were aware of the precious vertical space taken by this container, and decided to make its background partially translucent. While this may slightly help in “discovering” the scrollability of the main content, i’m looking forward to see the landscape-optimized layout of screens that currently show three static bars.
And finally here is a full-size screenshot that shows all the elements together – from the selected action bar button mirrored in a small seaglass overlay next to the location name to the drop shadows around the thumbnails, from the styling of “people” / “checkins” buttons to make them appear as part of the same button strip to the precise content alignment in the location summary section – to all the static navigation elements mentioned above.
Today’s post highlights the design of MindWork3D.com by The Core Units and Goksel Eryigit for Can Tuncer. The portfolio section above the fold sets the visual tone for the rest of this single-page site. Breaking away from a traditional grid, the portfolio thumbnails are arranged across cells with different weights and sizes, while still using the same underlying “cell square unit”. The navigation controls along the left edge of this section, as well as the bright blue arrow button further anchor this underlying unit and lay out the visual foundation for the following sections. Each portfolio thumbnail has an attractive rollover effect, and once activated, opens an overlay lightbox with slideshows of the specific work.
Scrolling down the page reveals that the navigation controls are anchored to the browser viewport. The buttons highlight as you scroll to the matching section (with a rather jarring “skip” over the “Blog” button that leads to an external site). Each button has its unique distressed texture, while still reusing similar underlying brushes; note the helpful shortcuts embedded in each button that provide quick info on navigating the sections with the keyboard. An extra amount of attention went into vertically aligning the buttons when the content is scrolled all the way up; however, the perceived bottom edge of the last button does not perfectly align with the matching edge of the portfolio row due to extra drop shadows.
Each subsequent section has its own combination of the main underlying elements – distressed textures, monochrome grayscale palette with sky blue highlights, large uneven serifs for section headers. Carefully aligned large square buttons in the bottom right corner of every section help balancing out the large swaths of textures; my favorite texture element here is the hexadot pattern of the portfolio section trying to “break in”, peeling away the crumbling whitewash texture. Overall, the design is a great match to the visual style of Can’s CG work.
P.J Onori on the difference between native and browser apps in his excellent “The Materials of Digital Products“:
There is a reason why we do not see highly refined and precise parts made out of most plastics. This does not negate the usefulness of such a material, but it has its specific uses. Similarly, certain technologies are more suited to precision crafting but often times have greater costs associated with them. A perfect example is developing for the mobile platform. A native iOS app will allow for much greater refinement in performance, motion and visual treatment, but there will likely be greater build costs compared to an HTML5 mobile app. Conversely, HTML5 will allow much greater flexibility in deployment and distribution. Both technologies have their place in mobile, we just need to know when plastic is more appropriate than stainless steel.
