Web & Patterns: patterns for a better web.

You’re looking for an Owl and what you get? A one-toothed cat photograph. That’s what happens when you run into Meagan Fisher’s inspirational 404 error page.

Actually we’re big fans of Vimeo‘s website design and we HAD to mention its beautiful footer background displaying a kind of Earth-scale-model dissection with isometric characters on it.

Shopping lists is a fab typographical project: this blog’s aim is turning little lost shopping lists into typography posters, showing that some poetry can be found also in a neglected piece of paper, trashed onto some store’s floor. For each saved specimen, Shopping Lost displays the original shopping list, who found it, where it was [...]

I was firstly drawn to Mikey Burton‘s portfolio, attracted by his beautiful illustrations and identity works. Then I’ve started admiring the unparalleled simplicity of his portfolio’s navigation menu: a simple list of gray links, with an open/close ajax effect, whose aim is just helping users to browse in the most efficient way. This website’s menu [...]

Did you know that an average chocolate bar has 8 insect legs in it? Or that you ca make diamonds out of Tequila? You can learn this and much more  by following Learn something every day, a stunning daily project by design studio Young. Every day a fresh new oddity, graphically exposed, is displayed on [...]

Connect-A-Sketch is a design tool that lets you create clickable prototypes from your wireframes and sketches. Its website displays a compact, streamlined, inspirational sign-in form: all the fields are incorporated in a gray arrow element laying on a textile pattern background. The log-in button, arrow-shaped too, stands out in the whole composition and enhances the feel of dynamism inherent [...]

This loooong 404 error page text from Jason Santa Maria’s blog made me chuckle. Oops! There isn’t even a remotely meaningful page here; not unlike the rest of this site. At least some of the other pages have some pretty pictures to look at. Why don’t you try starting again from the front door? Or [...]

Since I’m big for vectorial shapes I couldn’t help mentioning oh joy’s floreal menu. Flowers and herbs silhouettes are quite realistic drawn without any excessive flourish, keeping the website’s greenery imaginary far from beeing redundant or excessively ornamental. For further inspirational suggestions, I recommend that you have a look at Oh Joy’s Shop and Blog: you [...]

Explosively colourful call-outs and layout elements from Kidd81‘s portfolio help to warm up a gray day in Milan.

On the web, half of the job is finding out your way through a website to the seeked data, so it’s always a good web design practice helping people to get orientated, even if  it’s not strictly necessary. I find beautiful and useful Bkwld’s gallery pagination because it provides users with an extra bit of [...]

Fatcow is an Internet provider and Web hosting service 100% powered by wind energy. We think their green efforts are absolutely worth being mentioned and we also love their ecological inspired footer.

Sometimes you can get tired of perfectly shaped types or you just want for your website’s typography that little organic hint which only a hand drawn font can give you. If you’re needy for inspiration you can look at Kyle Steed’s portfolio entirely based on his Steed, a nice vector font that Kyle decided to share [...]

If you’re a typography geek as I am, you already know it, but for those rerefied minds that didn’t have yet the pleasure to discover it, Typetees is an online shop dedicated to showcase the best typographical tees available on the web. The tees are amazing and the overall layout feel is clean, fresh and quite agreable, [...]

A foul-mouthed, obscenely funny 404 error page from South Park Studios’ website. What else could you have been expecting from Kyle Broflovski and Eric Cartama put together in a single web page?

We love so much Fudge Studios’ layout that we wonder whether we have to be happy for or just loathe the fact a new website is coming up. This website simulates a photoshop (or generally a graphic editor) workspace soooo well that becomes difficult, if not impossible, writing what we’ve liked most. The favicon shaped [...]

Zara Picken‘s a Bristol-based illustrator that brings us back to the magic Fifties with her clean, marvelous illustration style. Aside from that, we definitely love Zara’s website structural rigor: broad wide spaces are cut into columns and rows simply by black/gray lines while circle shapes of various kinds play a major role in grabbing user’s [...]

Thumbtack is an online marketplace for local services, a free way to find new clients and manage the ones you already have. Just post your service once, and we’ll take care of the rest. Your service page will go live on Thumbtack instantly. I love the double-decker search form that allows one to switch from the [...]

When you combine two differents web design patterns you can get either a mess or a really interesting new element: in this case, Stuff‘s menu gets a compact and solid appearence, having shifted the properties pertaining to breadcrumbs trail to the horizontal menu. As you can see, home page’s rainbowy menu (at the top of the [...]

Mobily’s website oddly mixes main navigation (home, about me, contact) with portfolio’s pagination (previous/next). That’s kind a strange and incorrect from a stricly functionalistic standpoint, but, being this website an one-page website, rather easy to navigate, I don’t think it’s a big deal if the designer wanted to shuffle things a little . Aside form that, [...]

While I was… ehm… browsing on Torrentz yesterday night, I got this cute, moving Server Error Page. Hope the hamsters are feeling better by now.

When we first saw it, our jaws fell to the floor. Freezed, we’ve been keeping on staring at the screen, mesmerized by what our doubtful eyes were seeing. Then we burst out laughing. Then we started worrying about how one could possibly categorize this crazy web 2.0 app. The quirky idea IJML (that’s our short [...]

Since I’m blogging, my Twitter’s contacts are growing in a freakish way. In a while, using Peepnote, an online application developed to keep your peeps (which is this app’s lingo for Twitter’s following) organized, will be more necessary than useful. I love the interface’s vibrant colors and the warm appeal of the whole design, but what [...]

Aside from its beeing a blast and a really entertaining specimen of geeks literature, Ellis Weiners’ piece published on the New Yorker’s online edition helps me illustrate how a very simple vertical line and a little shot of red can trick our attention into reading an otherwise neglected content. In the overall economy of New [...]

TehCpeng is Shen Hang’s personal blog: Shen’s a Malaysian engineering student, a capable photograph and a devotee of the-C-peng which is this visually stunning tea drink. While we’re looking for where to find the-C-peng in Milan, we’d like to show you the cafeteria badge hanging on the top right corner and the red/yellow tabs, you can [...]

Letterpress styled text seems to be quite a popular typographic trend and I’ve been positively struck by the way it’s displayed on Tyler Thompson‘s blog because I think in this case it really helps users with reading negative text. Tyler, creative director at Squarespace, simply applies the css3 text-shadow property, that’s been available in Safari since the [...]

Web design work routine may be fairly interesting one moment and the other a complete bore. So that’s life and we can only try to be sensible by accepting what we can’t change. But when I was asked to design a badge add-on in five different sizes, I couldn’t help myself from sighing. The smallest among [...]

Typies is the English version of Letritas (that’s Spanish for little letters), an interesting blog about types and design by gifted graphic and obviously type designer Juan Pablo De Gregorio. I suppose that Juan’s involved in many projects since last post on Typies is dated June 19. So I was quite surprised this morning, when [...]

To be true, we should rename this category “menu & navigation systems“, so don’t worry if you find this post slightly off-topic. For now, I just want to show you this clever navigation system implemented by OnTheRoad. OnTheRoad is essentially an online travel journal that lets you to keep trace of your trips uploading, via [...]

Earthy, neutral colors and a gritty texture give these buttons a strong organic appeal. This hint is intensified by the zen-like environment they levitate in. Meditate people. PS If want to know see more about Ecoki you can visit the website or read our post.

I’m definitely an icon person. I mean, I really love drawing my own icons: maybe, since I’m not a full-time icon designer, they’re not quite as perfect as those you buy on stock images websites or you can get sometimes for free online but at least they’re mine, I know how I did them and, [...]