Feedly, IMHO, it’s a must-have Firefox add-on. In substance it’s a RSS reader, based on Google reader, that makes your contents look stylish and magazine-like as if they were designed by the coolest graphic studio in town. Add to this a nice karma feature that shows you how people react to your tweets. (Un)fortunately we [...]
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Error pages
Brown typography and a wood texture give a natural, warm hint to the page while the nicely scribbled horizontal ligns complete the organic quality of this comment form .
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Forms
Vibrant orange colors and the H crossbar bent into a happy smile really convey a joyous, bright mood. It made us smile.
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Logos
First I didn’t understand who was Daisy. Then when my brains started firing on all cylinders I realized it was a beautiful, funny 404 error page slightly inspired by The Wizard of OZ. If not entirely, I’m a little bit of Scarecrow myself.
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Copywriting,
Error pages
The latest thing in web buttons design appears to be the icon-button, a classic graphic button with an embedded icon. We like the fact that icons are able to bring to the forefront button’s intrinsic action and set you free from reading (or in this case understanding) textual labels or explanation.
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Buttons, Bullets & Badges
I’m a typomaniac, I confess, and my favorites ecommerce websites are most of all digital foundries’ websites. Usually this kind of website displays clean, sophisticated layout grids with minimal graphics elements such as horizontal dividers and flat geometrical buttons. Big headings and wide, spacious whitespaces (which basically means removing all the graphic overbearing elements from [...]
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Ecommerce
A nice picture, fresh and carefully selected can do wonders for your website: for example, sign up form are sometimes a little bit too bare, but you can warm up things with a colourful pic. Actually in this case the photo it’s the same from the home page but nevertheless it’s a good inspirational snip. [...]
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Sign In & Sign Up
Here you are a slighlty transparent play button that nicely fits in the overtly hi-tech layout of Pastebot’swebsite. For the ones interested in Iphone apps, we can add that Pastebot is the last creation released by Tapbots factory, a powerful clipboard manager that stores text & images copied from your iPhone/iPod Touch. Organize, apply filters [...]
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Buttons, Bullets & Badges
An effective, minimal and charming way to introduce your studio, your work or the philosopy underlying your materspieces could be writing it in a short introduction (or simply summarizing it with a witty quote). Even if you’re a vector virtuoso or a photoshop goddess, a nicely written text may be the way to distinguish yourself [...]
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Copywriting
Even if language is unfathomable for us and online translators are of any help, we do love this clean, minimal red and white product page from Muji Japan online store. Every block is squared, lines are perpendicular and every details is finely designed in an accurate, minimalist way: for example the beige and red callout [...]
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Ecommerce
A funny, nice search form for Kidsearch, a search engine that let children search and navigate safely through a directory of over 2000 sites in 3 languages (Italian, English and French) that have been visited and approved by the editorial staff . We love the “I’m feeling a lucky kid” button even though we think [...]
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Forms
Using different colours may lead to clashing, disorienting graphic outcomes. But I think this is not the case and we quite appreciated A S Hospitality expanding menu.
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Menu & Navigation
Fubiz is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for all of us and, even if sometimes the prev/next option is a slightly off-putting tool for browsing big galleries (yes we brave internet-moles who always want to go quickly through things), we loved the unparralled simplicity of this layout. By the way take a look at this gallery [...]
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Paginations
Minimalist web design it’s one of our (many) recurrent thoughts when reviewing websites. It’s really tough to come to inventive, not bare-looking solutions when you strip a website of every graphics assests and you’re not allowed to play any of the usual webdesign tricks. So we really loved this simple HTML menu, a nested list [...]
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Menu & Navigation
Tumblr is one of my favorite example of effective user interaction model. The sign up form is a masterpiece of simplicity and functionality: no confirmation fields to fill in, no threatening messagges or red alerts for mandatory informations or complicated password policy, just a minimal sets of data, a nice copy on the top, a [...]
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Copywriting,
Sign In & Sign Up
This really simple website achieves a funny and quite unique result by turning the background image upside down. The webdesign is from Creative Nights a nanoscale web design studio specialized in high-quality web interface design and development. Good work!
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Backgrounds
Owly‘s missing: have you seen it? One of the cutest, most clever, moving illustration ever made for a funny 404 error page.
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Error pages
Mutant Labs logo follows the ever growing vogue of animal inspired logos, though we think that this cyclop-squid really brings a breath of fresh air to a well-established logo design trend.
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Logos
Pedemontana it’s the name of a new big highway system that will connect Milan to other cities of northern Italy. This website’s art direction is from Leftloft, a big communication and identity studio based in Milan: the use of many different typographic weights and styles loosens up the grid stiffness while revealing an editorial, newspaper-like, [...]
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Typography
If it’s not a rule, it’s an established trend that big typograhic treatments requires few text, big spaces and consistent page structures. As in this case, a huge heading with a 3 columns grid it’s a common but effective layout pattern that has the pros of enganging readers attention and making texts easy readable.
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Typography
Uannabe (that’s an italianish spelling for the English Wanna Be) it’s basically an italian job board/community that displays in every detail a real high quality design. We really enjoyed the prince-frog logo (frogs lately became quite a trend in logo design, don’t you agree?): the execution is impeccable and the concept rocks.
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Logos
Hitchcock is a great free font inspired by Saul Bass titles (though the lettering artist that did the lettering for the Saul Bass was Art Goodman) and we are extremely grateful to Matt Terich for having recreated all these beautiful glyphs. If you want to see a good application of this typeface to an existing [...]
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Typography
When it comes to user interface patterns (or in short, design patterns) Yahoo Design Pattern Library is certainly a reference. But it’s a good example of applied web desing patterns too: the page in fact displays a breadcrumb trail which is a nice variation of the classic slash-kind, with the wow factor added by using [...]
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Breadcrumbs
Christmas time is coming and since Santa last year has been quite generous with us, we think this time we could help giving him some tips. So we’ve collected ten great online shop, with inspiring layouts too, where you may find some ideas for your gifts and some snips of beautiful web design interfaces too. [...]
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Articles,
Ecommerce
Gosh. We’ve caught it again: the 404 disease!
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Error pages
Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration. We loved the simplicity of its vertical menu made with rounded items overlapping and the nice simple icons that are [...]
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Menu & Navigation
Santa’s searching, our Christmas desktop wallpaper, is featured on Smashing Magazine as one of the best desktop calendars for December 2009. You can get it here (look for Santa’s searching)
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Freebies
For the 2009 World AIDS day we’ve created a supporting typographic poster (PDF). You can see it by clicking on the download button or on the link on the top right.
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Freebies
Japonshop is an online ecommerce website dedicated to selling Japanese food. We loved the unusual (for an ecommerce website) gray and pink palette, the clean products listing, the distinctly visible add to cart button and the funny manga-styled logo. Yummy!
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Ecommerce,
Logos
An original and funny tweets box with alternating avatar icons. It really put a smile on our face.
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Comments & Call-out