Web & Patterns: patterns for a better web.

You don’t have to be a magician to get a web page vanish. On the opposite, a splash of irony and a good illustration can do the trick of making your good mood come back.
Thanks Mixx for your magically inspirational 404 error page.

If you’re looking for a navigation menu that does have the power of making a strong, immediate impression on your users, you can use Life magazine’s menu as a good starting point.
Menu’s buttons are displayed as big tabs framing a nice thumb (for sure at Life they’re not short on good photos, so finding a good [...]

On my previous job, when I was working for a big web portal, we got used to look up to Yahoo’s interaction design as one of the most insightful example of dealing with users’ experience on a large scale audience.
When you’re not able to relate to a definite target (ok, I too hate this word, [...]

The things you don’t find on Internet! See what I found on Smashing Magazine while they were busy doing some clean up for their new website.

An awesome set of icons for Iphone has been released by App Bits in free download. Here you are some details about it:
Set of 48 toolbar icons for the iPhone toolbar. These buttons contain beautiful shaded portions to give added depth and to highlight icon features.
The icons in the preview to the left have effects [...]

Coolspotters is
a online service that makes it easy to discover and buy the products, brands, and fashions being used by your favorite celebrities – in their real lives, and in movies and television.
Coolspotters’ website features an interesting and quite articulate system of displaying error messages, while you’re still filling the sign up (or sign in) [...]

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 found [...]

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 certainly [...]

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 this self-initiated [...]

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 maybe [...]

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 can [...]

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