Today’s post highlights the design of DouglasMenezes.com. While at first it seems a hastily thrown together bunch of disjointed geometrical elements, it reveals a surprisingly consistent visual exploration. There are three key elements pervasive throughout the design – a color scheme, overlapping diagonal elements and freeform paths.

The color palette consists of two parts. First, it defines four colors used for diagonal elements – desaturated teal, bright pink, light pink and light ochre. The second group of colors – ochre, white and black is used for the background, texts and freeform paths. Link segments bridge between the two groups by borrowing both pinks for the foreground / rollover.

The vast majority of diagonal elements have the same 45 degree slant. Even a seemingly random patch of oversized layers in the top-right corner follows this rule. The same slants are used in the background highlights of section titles and small two-stripe icons next to some of the links (which, surprisingly, are implemented in Flash). Thin black freeform paths weaving in and out of the diagonal elements add a small and welcome degree of visual chaos to the picture. There are a few very small visual elements that break the four major orientation axes (horizontal, vertical and two diagonals). One of them is a thin pink strip of social network icons in the top-left corner, and a couple more can be found in the footer.

Strongly oriented diagonal elements are an emerging trend, and will appear in some of the next installments of Design, Uninterrupted.