Websites; Well designed and not so much...

The first website I dearly love is the home site of my favorite digital artist, Maggie Taylor.

www.maggietaylor.com

Although this is a flash site and can load somewhat slowly on an older machine like the one I have at home, it is visually stunning and created to showcase her amazing artwork. It is interactive to a certain extent, but the flash elements are separated so not every work of art has movement. This leads the viewer throughout the site by way of their curiosity to see what is next. The navigation is easy to decipher and it is a lovely and well designed site.

The second site I love is where the art of Eduardo Recife, a brilliant Brazilian artist lives.

http://www.misprintedtype.com/v3/about.php

He's got a unique and very grunge style that I love and his site is well designed for the person interested in his artwork. His commercial site is at

http://www.eduardorecife.com/

Although his commercial site is not poorly designed, and does show some of his prestigious client list, I don't care for the color scheme as much as his personal site, which is very simple and showcases his art better.

I found another site that I thought had a very cool design. It's for designer Michel Rijk.

http://www.michelrijk.nl/home.html

His design utilizes a silhouette of himself in motion, and has clickable areas around his body. When you click on his briefcase, the silhouette walks toward the viewer and opens up his briefcase, which then showcases his work. Although I am not a fan of the horizontal scroll, it is a clever idea for a portfolio.

Another great site is Goblin Creative.

Super cool/hip iphone design interface with some really nice movement and it's easy to navigate--even though its in another language! I really enjoyed it and I'd hire them to do work for me if I was in the market for a great multi-media design company.




Not so much......

First one, Hasrimy.com

http://www.hasrimy.com/

As previously stated, I am not a fan of the horizontal scroll. That's all this page is--one, big, long, horizontal scroll. I would much rather navigate a page that takes you to other pages than try to search through this mess. On the plus side, they have a nice little form at the beginning....

Second one, Ricard Howdy Design Services.

I'm not sure what this was created with. It's not supposed to be a Flash site, but it really slowed down my elderly Mac. Some of the design is clever (the images hanging from pins), but the way it is put together just didn't do it for me and the slowness really turned me off.

Third is Kodis Design.

There are nice elements here (the page he designed for Rock Concerts is nice) but I got really frustrated because there were no scrolling bars and whole bottom sections were obscured. It's one of my pet peeves because I don't have money for a spiffy new computer, and it really irks me when designers just "assume" that everyone out there has a huge screen and design accordingly. That really puts me off of the whole design.