Weekly Inspiration #9

This week's collection of websites for WI has been coincidentally grouped by country of origin. Last week I found some nice websites from Germany, Sweden and Australia. There is also one from US but I will describe it at the end of this entry.

"Zee Germans"

Design made in Germany

The title of the website is self-explanatory and the showcase is broken into categories (web design, gfx design, etc.). Typical to the Germans - Ordnung muss sein - and that has been achieved by grid-based layout. Typography and combined with the darker gray text make the content easy to read.

The most interesting feature is the ajax-based "lazy loading". Once the end of the page is reached, new content appears. Looks like an alternative to paging for me.

Moving Line

What makes me that I like that website is the simple and clean layout incorporated with the contrasting colours. Beige background and black elements with white and light gray content work really well. The details page for projects is equipped with the image carousel and show/hide content.

Mammut Medien

Coincidentally, the last German website it this showcase uses similar colour palette as the previous ones. Beige (or ecru?) background and dark gray content with additional blue. Works fine for me. The typography is also worth attention where chunky headings use Cufon as font replacement technique.

What personally annoys me is the exposure to social medias - some page have to many of those buttons.

The Swedes

Destination Skelleftea

Really nice and clean website could work even better if the language selector was more obvious. It took me while to locate and click that tiny flag for English version. OK, no more ranting.

The best thing about that website is the main navigation related to the activities that you can actually do. Nothing explains more like "See", "Do" or "Travel". Each of the main sections has its own dedicated colour for the heading and the sub-navigation, which is strictly related to the selected section (just see Eat or Travel). The interesting feature is the weather forecast panel that says "right now" for the current weather state.

Thomson Interactive Media

Looks like beige (or ecru) is quite popular. This interactive media company from Skelleftea (^) uses similar colour pallet on their website as described above the German ones. The layout is good organised and usage of the white space makes the content easy to read (at least for me).

What I find interesting is the sticky search form and big slim headings (Cufon as font replacement solution).

From Down Under

Let's move on to the outer location, Oz.

Charles Elena Design

This one-page website has quite unique and good looking layout. Use of nice graphics, colours (white, red, gray and black) and scroll-to (hello jQuery) functionality gives the impression of one consistent flow. What also looks good is the sticky header with the logo and main navigation.

FOX Classic

How to make website for classic movies channel more interesting and cool looking? Get some nice stills from the movie and get them working as full page background slideshow. And don't forget to include the picture of some lovely ladies and bad-asses (like Clint Eastwood smoking cigar).

Stills from the movies or movie related artworks are also included as page background when you view movie details. All combined with dark colours gives you the impression that you deal with something classic.

I'm (not) afraid of Americans

Joyent

The reason why I chose this website is not the layout and design. Can say that website is well-designed and the effort has paid off. The real reason is the interactive info-graphic (see "technology" section) done by Dave Shea (guy needs no introduction if you are into web standards). Normally I would expect flash over there but everything is HTML, PNG and JS-based. Nothing to add - just love it.

In the meantime Dave also found out, that PNG transparency support in IE8 still sucks.