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Nice website design

I was browsing the web, and the design of www.desingbuzz.com caught my eye.

The shadows that you typically see in web pages these days, as it's now easy to do in CSS, are taken to a new level. The article extracts have a slightly turned shadow.

The floral patterns create pattern to the page both in the background in white, as well as in the black footer. Also in the top of the page there is a floral pattern area, which repeats the same colors white, grey and orange colors as in the page, but in milder tones. The top pattern brings the post stamp featured articles nicely forward.

(download)

I once had a problem about how to link a picture and and text to one entity; well, here it is done with buttons. (I'm referring to the like and dislike buttons). Interesting that the like button has text but dislike button doesn't - seems it's not needed.

Screenshot_04

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Why don't we grow our houses?

Screenshot_01
Hamburg Skyscraper, Hamburg – Julia-Elise Hoins, Arnd-Benedikt Willert-Klasing, David Blezinger, Nikolaus Türk

Occasionally I read some great concepts, where buildings blend to the landscape as mountains, or that they grow on a skyline like gigantic plants. There are even ideas how you could grow your house from scratch with rapidly growing trees. Could this be our future, or do we continue living in block shaped cities?

The reason we humans want to build instead of grow, is probably due to our fear of nature. We want to control. It's easier to live in apartments that don't live. The cubes we live in are like a manifestation against nature. 

Over the years, we humans have shaped the earth effectively to our living habitat. Luckily, people are starting to realize our dependency on the ecosystem. If there is no nature, there won't be us either - so it could be a good time to shake hands with it.

What would be a better way to make peace than to artistically mimic forms of nature, a bit like Gaudí did. We can tame the nature, but be inspired about it. We can replicate the flowers, harmony, and flow what we find aesthetically pleasing. By growing houses and using sustainable materials we would not be escaping the fact that we humans also are part of this world. 

By the way, we can grow other stuff as well... Check these mushrooms replacing styrofoam!

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Again this kind of web layout...

They look nice, i don't deny it. I'm just wondering, do all ~2010 designed websites need to look like this?

Tinygrab

Here's the winning formula (example image: www.tinygrab.com):
- Big header with the logo
- links at the top 
- vertically divided spaces explaining the essentials
- Contacts and privacy policy on the bottom

Remember (!)
- 1-2-3 this is how easy it is
- some catching images and famous logos
- lots and lots of white space
- Light shadow or emboss on text & images
- Users must be able to like and tweet everything
- Show how popular you are

This format is especially common in application and product pages, in my experience. That also tells the story of how I got bored to the format - I was going through many plugin application pages, and they all started to feel the same to me.

These websites of course do look a lot nicer than the crammed left aligned pages with tiny side navigations, which the web used to be full of. Now the sites are finally bragging with lust of space, gorgeous webfonts, big images and headers. You could call this type of page a long "magazine type of" layout. 

Also, as it has been admitted - I think even Nielsen recently admitted - that users DO scroll! Thus it is quite common that the whole page is just one long page; and the links on the top lead to different parts of the page. This is of course nothing new, anchors have existed since day one, but the magazine type of showing off the page is different. No more long text paragraphs, but many subtitles and images instead!

Could be that the horizontal sections are disappearing, and the page is aligned with using even bigger images and even more white space. Let's see where this ends up ;-).

Check this funky design! :-D
Screenshot_10

Some reading:

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Beautiful buttons

Found this nice button style from http://thinkvitamin.com/. Simple and nice style, which reminds me a lot of the Nokia N9 new UI style. 

It's funny that the colors and round shapes of the buttons actually seem a bit like vitamin pills :-).
Screenshot_01

Here was one other user interface detail that captured my attention (www.firefox.com). This button was not a drop down menu, but it could be, if the arrow was facing downwards. What a beautiful drop down menu it would be!

Note also that the button/dropdown is centered to the area, not left aligned, which gives it more emphasis, and also more space. Interesting choice, but it works well on this context.

Kursiivi_fontti_ja_tilaa_nappu

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Social media phone

Someone invented a super small phone that follows twitter and facebook friends and makes calls. But they were not first, N900 does it too - and few more things...

Pic:

Media_httpwwwyankodesigncomimagesdesignnews20091119elitephonejpg_mzxdwfgsndchtwk

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Tumblr_kto0wqhhvy1qatzkco1_1280

Design is about seeing the possibilities in the context provided.

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Indeed, emotion makes you smart. Without emotions, your decicion making ability would be impaired” - D.A. Norman

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