We're a bunch of wacky designers and developers living all over the country while working together to bring our clients beautifully made and efficiently run websites. We live for this kind of stuff.
Did Gibson think that nobody would notice when they completely-ripped off Apple for their new website design?
For reference, here is a screencap of Apple’s site:
Which brings me to two points:
Spectator.org is the newest addition to the list of sites we’ve designed and built.
Since The American Spectator has been around for 1967, keeping the established identity was an important part of the design process. We retained their look by re-using the existing color palette and by keeping the established logo simple in a basic white on red header. Further distributing the red, we threw it into the date-bars, content category headings, third column headings, and buttons. Using the black in the large featured post area serves as the focal point, drawing the eye with an over-sized image and further distributing color. We continued this with the bold black post headings and the background for the active state of the nav list in the right column.
We were also tasked with keeping a good chunk of the content available on the main page without a ton of scrolling. To accomplish this, we kept the spacing between posts on the homepage to a minimum. This expands of course when you click through to read the full article. To create visual separation of content, we used thin borders on the bottom of each post and kept the article headings big compared to the accompanying text.
Along with the re-design, this site has been built on a newly built backend framework which allows for much greater content control by the editors. Additions to the backend are super simple now as well, so any client changes/requests can be managed quickly and efficiently.
In May of 2007, Reason.com asked Dancing Mammoth for help with a new endeavor: the launch of a website to serve as home for a series of short videos hosted by Drew Carey. In The Drew Carey Project, Drew would take to the street covering important current events and help people think about government in new ways.
We began by creating several mockups in Photoshop, utilizing some existing media to develop cohesive looking examples. With these, they were able to give us great feedback, helping to push the designs forward and moving closer to a design which met their needs.
A few color tweaks, a section or two added to the right column and the design was complete. Reliably serving up high quality video to a potentially massive visitor base was crucial, so we went with the Amazon S3 grid for this. So far this has been the perfect solution as well as an inexpensive one.
Currently, we are re-working the center column a bit to allow for smoother work flow, but the same basic feel will be retained.
Notice how the text changes color on hover for the “send us your videos” and “Drew Carey Project Archive” areas in the right column? This was accomplished by using an <a> which has this image applied to it using the background declaration. There’s a :hover state for the <a> which shifts the background image up by sixty eight pixels.
