LevelTen Web Design

LevelTen Web Design is a web design company based in Dallas, Texas. Many of their clients carry widely recognized names. They seem to market to larger companies who want a professional look for their site.

LevelTen’s web site uses a clean and structured look. The lines are thin and giving the site a sharp appearance. The layout is boxy and elements line up which is what gives it its structured look. Furthermore the site uses a monochromatic coloring scheme which keeps it from being to distracting.

The navigation menus are also clean, however there are two of them. This may be confusing to some viewers. Furthermore when I viewed their page on clients, the logo for Alt-N Technologies did not display. This may turn some potential clients off.

Overall I’d say it’s a professional looking site and well done with only a couple of changes that need to be made.

Eolo Perfido

Warning: includes some nudity and content that may be offensive to some. You can play it safe by sticking to galleries 6 and 7 but you will miss out on some awesome photos.

This site engages its visitors with an eclectic mix of photos ranging in style from gothic chic portraits to still lifes of an old world village.

The website design is very clean and employees a minimalist style. This puts the focus where it should be, on those awe-inspiring images. The navigation is an easy to follow hierarchical format with smaller texts under their headings so you can see where they are in the whole scheme of things. Placing photos side by side is a nice touch aesthetically but may cause difficulties for users who aren’t use to a horizontal scroll bar on web pages. Furthermore, the addition of a “next gallery” link at the end of each gallery is a welcome convenience; what a pain it would be to have to scroll all the way back to the beginning just to continue with your tour.

The photographer of this website is skilled indeed. Let’s take a look at galleries 6 and 7. In the first picture in gallery 6 we see a boy and his father err… grandfather? Anyway, the placement of the man’s face is somewhere near the intersection of thirds in the upper right while the boy is near the bottom left. An inferred diagonal line is created between their faces and family traits shine through in their eyes and smile lines. The majority of the pictures here are close up portraits leaving the faces with nowhere to go. This adds an element of tension to the photos.

Finally, lets take the photo of the child with her back towards us in gallery 7. She stands perfectly perpendicular to the horizon. With lines straight across and straight up and down, this would create a boring static picture. Simply by tilting the camera the photographer has made the picture more dynamic and interesting.

Misenheimer Creative

Misenheimer Creative is a print and web design company based here in Georgia. Their site not surprisingly includes examples of their work in both mediums. More unexpectedly however, you can find pages with guitar videos and some ranting about Christianity. What you can’t find is an explanation as to what these pages are doing on the site.

This site seems to be geared toward most any company for professional help in graphics or creating or adding to their web presence. It sports a clean and perhaps safe design. The graphic of a hand behind frosted glass on the front page creates an air of mystery to intrigue the viewer while a mess of lines and nodes hints at ideas of the World Wide Web. A vibrant orange lifts the viewer’s spirits. Sadly however he is not treated to any other hues. As the viewer navigates even further all saturation is lost. This does however allow the viewer’s attention to be drawn to the products in all their psychedelic splendor.

I do enjoy the simplicity of the site. I like the clean lines and the easy navigation provided on the left side. In the “about” an “why us?” sections they use a filter on their graphics that reminds us of their print media background. I don’t however agree with certain design choices on the site. The animation at the top draws attention away from the site’s content. Furthermore the absence of a previous button in the design examples makes navigation a little more difficult. And finally the text is far too small in the “about” and “why us sections?”.

ThinkGeek.com

Thinkgeek.com is a site for selling unusual products, most of which you won’t find in stores. It is intended for geeks like myself and the bored office worker. Here you can find everything from T-shirts praising the all mighty caffeine molecule to weapons for cubical warfare.

Targeting visitors probably from their teens to 30s who still have a child like demeanor and pride in their intelligence, this site features intellectual imagery and a sometimes sarcastic writing style.

The site draws you in from the first page with a mix of useful and humorous products. It features a circuit board background and an exposed brain in the logo to appeal to your cerebral nature and a monkey for a mascot to appeal to childhood fascinations.

I particularly like how it gets to the good stuff right away and how the front page has different products every time you open it. Furthermore, the navigational bar, though not impressive by today’s standards, serves it’s purpose well using a hierarchical structure.

The positioning of the products amongst each other is slightly haphazard but not enough to cause a problem. And I have no idea what the baby in the upper right hand corner has to do with anything.

Overall I’d say it’s a well-designed site although it doesn’t POP for me. The content however more than makes up for it’s so-so design.