First off, the colors. While green, in and of itself, is a lovely color—it's the color of grassy meadows and sunlit forests, after all—whoever "designed" this site chose the worst possible shades of green and them paired them together to create something grotesque enough to make Mother Nature throw up a little bit in her mouth.
Next, there's the icons. Icons that I'm sure were pretty cool and even "cutting edge" when people first started decorating their GeoCities websites with them back in 1997. Sure, the whole "retro" look is cool these days, but only as long as you're doing it ironically. In other words, by people who are actually cool, but choose to dress nerdy, and thus make the nerdy look cool.
This, however, is a case of a nerd who has no idea what cool is, can never hope to know, and still gets beat up for his lunch money even as an adult.
On top of all that, there's the sheer clunkiness of the site itself. Trying to find my way around that site is like trying to pilot the space shuttle.
All of that has driven me absolutely stark-raving bonkers for some time now, and I finally couldn't stand it anymore. It was like walking past a painting over and over that's hanging crooked: I just had to stop and straighten it. And then get a whole new painting, because the original one looked like ass.
Now, I didn't waste a ton of time on this; I didn't put the same sort of effort into the user interface, iconography, etc. that I would with a normal, paying job. I used buttons, textures and icons other designers have created and made available free online. Basically, I just wanted it to stop looking like ass. (Click images below to embiggen)
Home page:
Artist page:
Gallery page:
Lookit that. Seriously. So much better. Sigh... Okay, I can breathe now...
4 comments:
Wow! This is a huge improvement! I might start using DA again in it looked like this.
Wow, I wish they would actually implement your design. DA is like a huge universal pool of particles. Very thick to swim through. Every now and then you find a nugget of gold, but it's tough. Great looking stuff. Maybe you should show them!!!
The only thing bothers on the home page, is the drop-down user menu, which appears to be dropping down directly on an image in the content pane, which is why I think would be better to have it inside the logo, and maybe expand the left sidebar a little for the drop-down as well.
Hi !
Quite nice job on this, but I think you just use too much gradients. Their are "chrome" effects everywhere, buttons, backgrounds, drop downs, dividers etc... This is way too much in my opinion. the grey "carpet" texture isn't soft enough, it disturbs the sight of content. Moreover, I'm sorry about that^^, all is a bit too big, there's no "big, average, small" elements that would help prioritize things above others.
Nice colors anyway, and nice initiative !
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