Today’s post highlights the design of BohemiaDesign.co.uk. A carefully crafted design reflects the self-professed refined taste of a boutique shop of hand selected items – from the cerulean color palette to delicate floral background patterns in the header, from ornamental navigation arrows of product slideshows to vignette hand written fonts used in the bottom half, from simple typography to artfully themed icons of external brands.

On a less positive side, the design can be a little bit more consistent in its usage of foreground colors for section headers and links. A mix of slate blue, dark cerulean and orange is inconsistent at best and misleading at worst. It is also not immediately clear what is the interaction between the currency and country dropdowns in the expandable header bar at the top of the page. Changing a country also selects the matching currency, but changing the currency does not change the country selection.

Yet another language drop down causes automatic translation of the content and poses many more problems that it solves (or aims to solve). Things such as image-based menu header that remains untranslated, translated content that overflows the intended visual bounds (try switching to German and scroll all the way down), mismatch between orientation of textual and visual elements under right-to-left languages (switch to Hebrew), mix of translated and non-translated content in the same text block (switch to Russian) are just a few examples of how an automatic tool can destroy a hand tuned visual structure.