Examples of Good Design
King Arthur Flour – http://www.kingarthurflour.com
www.kingarthurflour.com
This delicious-looking site is an excellent example of evocative and informative design. Warm and inviting in color and typography, the viewer is instantly seduced by the site by the image of a baked good right in the middle of the home page. The ingredients that make up any web page – palette, typography, design elements, branding, content – are assembled together here to create a strong, consistent design. In fact, the design basically resembles a bakery or even a baked good, which in itself is an advertising for their product. Navigational hierachy is clean and clear. What could have been a standard and pleasant static brochure site for King Arthur Flour, is instead bumped by by the subtle integration of interactivity and call for community on the home page and sprinkled throughout. Interactivity include a link in the highlights area in the middle of the page to a pleasant video of baguette baking, a link to their Twitter account, and having their blog be one of the top navigation links. In addition, the the precious upper-left-hand real estate given to their 1-800 number!
KEXP – http://www.kexp.org
www.kexp.org
The workmanlike website for the radio station kexp.org is several years old, but it is still effective. Kexp.org knows it’s audience well and keeps the content up high, even with the addition of fairly large and highly placed advertisements. It’s a highly structured and controlled website, laid out on a rigid, narrow grid and yet there is a lot of personality and spunk behind every module, with effective graphics, still spunky color palette, and clear, explanative content that draws in the viewer. It’s an oldie, but it still works.
Examples of Bad Design
The Weather Channel – http://www.weather.com
www.weather.com
Weather.com gets a thumbs down for incorporating it’s most important element on their site – the weather search box – into the banner advertising. Boo. In fact, the advertising and the content on this site can be indistinguishable. While this may be a matter for debate as to whether this should necessarily be a bad thing (can advertisers provide useful content?), it does mean that the user might have a hard time finding exactly what they want (such as the 10-day weather forecast for a particular area.) There is a lot of content on this site, and if it was better designed, providing additional content can be useful (see kexp.org above as an example of a site with a lot of content that a user might want to stumble upon), but instead of getting drawn in deeper to the Weather Channel (despite lots of video content) the site is difficult to navigate. They should do a careful analysis of their audience – travelers would be one for example – and figure out what would be the most effective way of providing value without provoking irritation.
Coffee Geek – http://www.coffeegeek.com
www.coffeegeek.com
Coffeegeek.com isn’t the worst site but a very typical small site. It suffers from the mediocrity of templated design. It has plenty of good, original content, but unfortunately this content is buried in an endless series of table cells, which look like advertisements. Discussion boards are hard to understand. Beveled headers are narrow, oddly right-aligned and and use a rounded typography so they are difficult to read. Based on the visual design alone, there is little trust by the viewer that there would be good content in this site.
Compare Design
A good example of old v. new (simplistic) design is for Holiday Inn Express:
Old: http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/ex/1/en/home
New: http://www.holidayinnexpress.com/hotels/us/en/reservation?optin=true
Internet craziness
And of course there is always http://timecube.com/, for your little dose of internet-crazy.
