Week 3 (Part 1) - Design Aesthetics

For this week we have two tasks and I'll look at the first one here.

This part is about doing research into design styles and aesthetics that both appeal to what I'd like to incorporate into my website and designs that I personally think look impressive. For my research I've looked into the website CSSelite.

The first category that I'd like to include in my design is a very clean looking website.

Mighty Dream is a web design studio by American web designer, Eric Grossnickle. The site looks incredible. It's a very clean and smooth looking website and the colour scheme works. It's easy on the eyes, and it's layout makes navigating simple. These are design elements I want to apply to my website; clean looks, easy navigation and an attractive colour scheme. Mighty Dream has all of these elements and more. Excellent design.


Secondly, I'd like to incorporate a strong colour scheme. Harmony within colours is very important and is something I'd like to learn more about.

answerJam is an interesting website. It's an anonymous community set up for users to share secrets, confessions, vents and dreams. But it's not the content of the website that I'm interested in. The colours that the designer has used work extremely well. The majority of the colours used are blue and white. They contrast together to make reading and browsing the website smooth and pleasing. Simple design and using minimal colours is something that I've always considered important, and is a factor I will be thinking about when I design my website.




Lastly I want to incorporate an overall unique design aspect and aesthetic approach. This means thinking outside the box of traditional website design. Turning images and pictures into functionality.

Take Kulturbanause for example, a German web design portfolio by Jonas Hellwig. He's developed a waterfall/mountain scenery and turned it into a website. This type of website design really impresses me. The website flows well and is easy to use. Normally I think that if someone has put huge amounts of work into the design stage, the usability might be compromised. However this is not the case with Kulturbanause. Even though I might not yet have the skills to produce something anywhere near this level, I'm still going to consider unique design aspects when it comes time to produce my website.

Now on to Part 2: Patterns.