I’m always on the lookout for new and innovative designs for sites. I think that is one of the many things that always intrigues me about the web. When people combine art with functionality. I’ve seen plenty of sites that make you just go, ummm what? “What does this do?” “Why am I here?” or “How do I get this to do something… oh look something shiny!” I do really enjoy when I find a site that really shines in functionality and design. (This is why I dig the guys at Substance so much. They do a great job saddling the two concepts, design vs function).
I found about a cool site through a ’round about way. @richjoslin posted a link to a design blog in a FriendFeed room “Web Design, The Good The Bad, The Ugly”. The design blog is called Cult Foo. They have a compliation of a bunch of different sites to check out. If you have 1/2 hour to kill, check it out (the tag cloud, literally, on the top with the fixed position and use of .png transparency is a nice touch). One of the site on there is what inspired me to write this post - Digiguru.
Digiguru is the blog/portfolio site for Craig Jaimeson in South Africa, a flash and front end designer. The site that he created is a full flash one with a clean calendar interface. It has several nice touches including Full Screen, permalinks using SWFAdress and smooth transitions. The site functions well, and allows him to create large graphics to convey his message instead of typing a bunch of paragraphs. I like this approach because if he doesn’t want to write a large dissertation, he doesn’t have to. That is where I feel blogging is difficult, writing something that matters. This is a simple way to convey a message, and if you need to add some text so you understand what the message is, so be it.
I would love to see is some sort of further organizing on the site. Either a tag cloud or even a stream of titles of posts so you know what some context the content is about. There aren’t any room for comments. This might be a tough thing to handle, but I think a timeline, or some way to inject two way communication would be spot on.
I would love to see if this could be an open source project. Now that would be cool. Be able to distribute this as a blogging engine/presentation engine… hell, I would even pay some cash for it. Not a ton, under $50, but if he’s looking to recoup his investment.
Let me know of other sites that have inspired you, as I’m always on the lookout.
