Sarah Brown's Weblog

I Love Typography Menu on top, rollover changes color. Plain, use of whitespace, black text with some red text here and there

I Love Typography: 15 Examples of Excellent Web Typography Would have been better if they explained what was so great about these examples.

Typographica A graphic with “Typographica” runs along the top of the page, gray with white letters. The rest of the page is divided into two columns. Print is black with links in light red. The bottom has examples of type.

Planet Typographyhad orange blocks with curved edges. The colors were orange and shades of purple. I liked the history of different fonts, even though it’s not important in the scheme of things. I want a font that works well. One problem I had was the dead links. Compared to other typography sites we had to look at for this week, I think this one was my favorite.

I enjoyed looking at the different textures and backgrounds, especially ones that were available for free. In the interest of time, I limited myself to ones that could work with my site’s theme.

Urban Dirty I generally stay away from websites with white font on black background, but here, it works – the font size is large enough to read, and the black background goes with the whole urban theme.

Best Textures Flickr Group On Flickr, the background is white, text is black except for the logo in hot pink and blue, and blue hyperlinks. This draws focus to the important part of the site – the photos.

Torley Textures All I can say is colorful. Very colorful.

Deviant Art Textures The colors for this website are white, grey, and blue-grey (mono anochromatic?)

Texture King has a white background, with boxes bordered in orange.

Grunge Textures uses the curled yellowed page of a book as background. You can choose backgrounds of concrete, wood, stone, tombstone, brick, asphalt, etc. I ended up using a stone background from here for my website. I tweaked it a little to make it fit.

Grunge Style The examples are listed (images and everything) along the left side of the page. I like the comments under each image and how you can link to the sites. Other links on the Smashing Magazine site are in narrow columns to the right. It makes it easy to focus on the main information on the left.

Chapter 2 in Beautiful Web Design was all about Color. It’s interesting now to see the different color combinations, tertiary colors, etc. And to learn which color combinations work well when.

Web Style Guide looks plain, with its black text on white background and blue hyperlinks, but it makes it easier to see. The site has a large column on the left, and narrow column on the right. One problem I see is under the menu on the right, there are advertisements that have nothing to do with the site (one of the limitations of using a server?) The menu stands out, because it uses a blue tint for background.

Universal Usability has a bar on top in either a purple tint or blue shade with a yellow logo. This bar appears on every other page within the site (a frame?). A desaturated version of this color is used as the border for a desaturated yellow background. The mix of these particular yellows and purples make the site look inviting, even if I don’t understand the content.

JJG.net has cool icons. The shade of blue used for links is a bit bright, and might put some people off – at first. That color on the black bar on top of each page looks good, though – bright blue on black gives it a hip techy feel. And it stands out on the white background.

Smashing Magazine: 50 Blog Designs uses variations of orange and grey in its color scheme. Other colors belong to sample blog pages/templates posted on the site. The number of links on the right seem overwhelming when I first glance at them, but on further scrutiny, I realize there are links that will be beneficial to me. Above each blog photo are no more than 3 sentences telling what’s good about the blog and a link to the actual blog page.

I’ve come to realize that the textbooks are easier for me to understand than many of the websites I have to peruse for this class. Could it be that the textbooks assume you don’t know anything and the websites are very technologically-oriented?

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers provides information about domain names and is in many different languages. Links to pages appear across the top and left side of the page, so it is easy to jump around.

Internet Traffic Report is an up-to-date site that measures the speed of Internet connections worldwide. It measures speed in milliseconds.

Internet World Stats has you scroll down long pages to get graphs, pie charts, and links. The pages are divided into three columns: the right and left are striped blue, and the center column contains the information.

CAIDA Internet Infrastructure Each page has different color bars for headings, but all have the CAIDA logo. Emphasis is on content, so there isn’t any graphics except the logo and heading type.

Pew (non-profit research center) The homepage has three columns; the middle column has a light background color. The menu appears on every page; surfers don’t need to use the back button to get to the homepage, they just click on the page they want to see next. The layout is well-organized, and the site is updated daily. This site is good for political and current news research and trends.

Nielson Net Ratings (private research center) The site uses shades of blue in its menu backgrounds. Main menu is horizontal on the top and the submenu runs vertically along the left side. Website creators can measure demographics of users.