Albion West Coast

Albion West Coast is a creative agency with offices in London and California. This website is the home of their West Coast operation, and immediately I am pulled in by the fun colors and amazing footer design. After further investigation this page just seems like one part of the London website, as it is really only one page with a few links and no real navigation. I wish there was a navigation. So for this post I suppose I will have to jump back to that main page, Albion London. Here the navigation is clean and simple, and overall easy to understand. The wording is straightforward, and the architecture is very easy to understand. Once again the type is simple and clean, keeping with the overall aesthetic of the site. I really loved the layout and design of the West Coast page, but unfortunately they seem to loose that some of that fun style in the London page. The colors are similar and tie everything together between the two, but overall it feels like something is lost between the sites.

Digital Craft Instrument

Digital Craft created this site to house their creative portfolio and blog. There is one main navigation at the top of each page, which stays the same throughout. I like the selected state of each of the tabs, and I think the simplicity of the wording makes them easy to use. The white space surrounding this area of the page helps it to feel important and makes it clear that this is the navigation. The architecture of the site is very simple, and its easy to know where you are within the layers. The home page is also always accessible by clicking on the logo. I think that overall the type looks nice, and it is probably one of the reasons I was drawn to this particular site. The various sizes help the hierarchy, but I think even more differentiation would be nice. The layout of the pages stays fairly consistent as you explore the site, and I like that even the blog seems to fit with the overall layout and design. I think the first thing I notice is the large images and large type, which is good for a portfolio website. I wish that the work was more prominently displayed however, and could be housed within one page rather than in separate tabs. It just makes it more difficult to quickly navigate through the work, and limits the number of projects that are displayed. It would be nice to see more, more quickly and obviously displayed. The simple blue black and grey color palette is bold but clean and attractive. There are a few areas, however, where I wish there was more to this site. The photos of the employees look clickable, but they aren’t. The logos of clients don’t link to anything. Overall the design is nice, but there are many areas for improvement.

Dotvita Portfolio Site Design

The Dotvita website immediately appealed to me based upon its bold imagery and many icon sets. I seem to have a fondness for well-designed and appropriately used iconography, especially when combined with strong typography. I think that some may argue that the logo and identifying information appear too small, especially on the homepage of this site. To me, it allows the headlines and main navigation to draw my attention that much faster. As this is primarily a portfolio website, it is important that the design itself makes the user want to browse the content, even if the motivation is simple curiosity. There seem to be a total of 3 navigation areas throughout this site. The first is intuitively at the top of the page, just under the main image. These buttons immediately appear clickable simply because of the thin stroke surrounding them. For the majority of the site, this is the only navigation that is apparent. Under the portfolio tab, however, two more navigation systems appear. One, on the left, is modeled to resemble a ruler or depth meter, and playfully allows the user to navigate the blog-style display of work. The other is housed under each project’s image set, and allows you to scroll through multiple images. Over all, the navigation labels themselves are a bit playful and could be seen as unclear by some. The fun naming would probably not hold up for a much larger website with deeper content, but for a simple portfolio site it seems to work. I like that the architecture is flat as well, I don’t think there is need for something more complicated. The simplicity of colors help the site stay focused, with dark tones throughout the background with pops of color on key typography. Overall, I found the blog-like portfolio layout to be interesting and useful, just because its different than the standard format. At the same time, it could be considered confusing to those who are less attuned to the web and who are looking to quickly access a specific project.