Adobe recenlty redesigned their site to be faster and cleaner than ever before. It sets high standards for clarity and content that is both beautiful and informative. Consistency of type, imagery and layout stregthens users' identification with this magnificently large site. The site houses a wealth of great design content including stock photography, software tips and tricks and Adobe's typefaces. In 1999 Adobe embarked on providing detailed portfolio samples and articles on leading-edge web designers, illustrators and new media greats. These interviews are usually very informative and very worth checking out.... More
Andersen's site provides a bold and distinguised graphical interface which combines many elements of color, imagery and contrast that provide an overall sensation of cohesiveness. Redesigned since this review was posted. Anderson's consistent navigation hierarchy was enhanced by colors that differentiated individual sections with subtle shadings that neatly encapsulated information within each page. This site has since been redesigned.... More
Art Center College of Design's site is the cream of the crop of intelligently constructed sites. Never has it been easier to locate the information you need than here. Art Center's site is characterized by its utilitarian navigation; the pull-down menus are implemented to perfection. It is clean. It is fast. It is one subtly powerful site.... More
While we can't speak to the name of this company and its similarities to a word you certainly don't want your company associated with, we can definitely say there are several things we liked about this simple corporate presentation. Sure, it's brochureware, and there's no bells and whistles attached at the edges, but it has a very understandable navigation, big easily read buttons, and a clean presentation that few corporate heads (or their wives) could really find disagreeable. Perhaps it's a bit boring, but hey, it's gene therapy services! Avaris is based in Stockholm, Sweden.... More
Bruce Dunlop & Associates (BDA) is a creative agency that provides a range of promotion and design services to broadcasters and advertisers worldwide. In this re-launch design, animated 3D-Waves, a lot of high quality motion graphic-content and a simple, clean interface that allows you to easily surf all four worldwide offices and view the film, media and TV spots they have developed for a number of high-end clients. In fact, BDA does everything but webdesign, which is why this site was farmed out their peer counterparts Elastique, a smaller German design firm that BDA has chosen for their ability to create this fully-loaded motion-based interactive design.... More
Blue Marlin sells hand- stiched baseball caps from bygone eras. This is a sharp, appropriate and instantly classic site design. Blue is beatifully branded, following a unique and picturesque design throughout the site and navigation. Blue's inner pages are thoughtfull, clean and easy to use. The products really shine on this site.... More
A very cool navigational work, merging great interface work with strong design. Their premium quality products get nothing less than a premium web site architecture - with its nooks and crannies filled to the brim with tasty nuggets of information. Notice the excellent frame work, and the meta- navigational system that plays off the letters in "Champion". Champion was bought by Int'l Paper a few years later, and site is no longer up online. Original design by Jessica Helfand | William Drenttel.... More
When you represent over a half-million union workers in Canada, you have a lot of information to disseminate and a lot people to inform. So when CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) turned to Happy Cog, the design firm arm of A List Apart, to redesign their hulking site, it became a showcase in how to manage information sprawl. CUPE's new design displays an expertise in information architecture, graphic and type design, and web standards. The results turn the intimidating into the friendly and approachable, and simultaneously provides a public relations trump card for this workers association. While we're not big fans of standardized employee policies that pay you while you strike, we are certainly huge fans of beautiful, standardized design and information architecture that elegnatly solves information design problems.... More
A clean Flash-driven corporate site with great navigational tidbits, and subtle shading in this uniquely shaped site that all comes together to create a nicely refined feel for this site. A promotional corporate site from Motorola for their Digital DNA product. Each page presents a new graphic nugget of goodness. Especially check out some cool features like the DigiCrawler, an interactive walking 'stick-creature' that you can modulate and control through environmental variables. Inside Look: Soda (UK) produced and liscenced a branded version of their sodaconstructor called DigiCrawler to Motorola as part of their promotion of the DigitalDNA brand.... More
An online center for musical promotion and discovery, we found this front page possesses an eloquent reflection of musical sounds and notation that combined fluidly with navigational instruments along the left, bottom, and within the main area. Ear1 featured good typography, branding and navigation, all rolled into one page. No longer online since this posting.... More
One of the first sites to feature complete full-screen - semi-video - Flash with an effective interface to accomplish total user immersion. Boldly emphatic but with a nice duotonal edge that lends a touch of sophistication and saves K. Even so, anything less than ISDN may lose some of the fabulous flow and those ego-maniacal movie trailer style intros. As far as we know, at this time, the firm does not exist or has reformed under a new name.... More
Ah, we can feel the effervescent cleaning power at work on our brains already... With this sky-blue background and gravity-defying water droplets, this single page gateway site for Electrolux – a Swedish appliance company – oozes with a fresh, sensual appeal. Unfortunately, the killer drawback to this page is that every single link takes you to another pop-up Electrolux site... Which wouldn't be so bad if the designs were more similar. It's a great gateway splash page, but ultimately this page is 99% functionally irrelevant. It's a testament to the difficulty (and failure) of unifying a multitude of branded global sites under one design. We can only hope, perhaps, that the design of this one page wonder will eventually be "filtered-down" to all the sub-country sites. In the meantime, enjoy the bubbles, but just don't click on anything!... More
