21–30 of 88 posts
If any quality designer wants to work with a standoff client; let me know: mmiller@agentshowroom.com
as for the actual ui elements. i think a lot of companies out there, specifically the freelance design firms, are taking their inspiration from apple's mac os x ui elements. the gradients and button styles are very similar, and then other freelance designers will look at that and try to find ways to change or improve that even further. i think it all ultimately derives from apple though.
many designers i know of will use a css grid framework; we used grid 960. the reasoning behind the number 960 pixels is described on their web site:
"All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with."
Though there has to be a balance between creativity and standardization.
It's not necessarily a bad thing that everyone follows the fashion, though. It makes it easy to quickly scan the page.
There's fashion in everything from fashion, through web design to science. I think the clean, sans-serify, widely spaced design grew to prominence in part as a reaction to busy, link-heavy corporate/portal sites and for a time it looked friendly, clean and simple. Now it's so common it manages to also look generic and corporate. The visual design has also become a bit a bit of a habit, at the expense of usability. It…
loopt on the other hand has been around for a while and has 4 different products (loopt, star, pulse, mix). each one has a different purpose, serves different markets, and pairs up with different devices. you can imagine where the challenge is at: you have 4 things--which one do you want to say first, and how do you want to say it? and risk confusing someone by showing too much about the other 3 too quickly.
i think a better comparison is to someone like zynga or panic, where there are several products developed for several markets. it's an interesting problem when people who aren't aware of your various apps fail to understand fundamentally what your company does. google is still a search company, and their home page still shows a search box, but they don't spend any time explaining any of their other products on their home page either. and yet their products still get used.
Lots of whitespace improves readability, as does the use of a sans serif font. Deviate from either and a lot of people will hit the back button because they can't easily read your text.
A clear call to action massively improves conversion. The rectangular button in a dominant colour will increase signups by 10-20%.
960px wide because the majority of web users can see a page this wide without scrolling. For the same reason, all the important stuff on the site should fit within the first 500px vertically. a 960px grid is highly divisible and so gives you very flexible layout options with minimal hassle. There's a strong argument for 720px, but it's largely a question of browser demographics.
The links in the footer should be stuff for people who know what they're looking for, providing greater information density without added clutter. It works in large part because it's a convention, but it works nonetheless.
Familiarity matters in web design - the better people can predict where things will be, the better they can navigate.
That isn't to say that all these websites work as well as they should do, but there's only one reason to deviate from the norm - if you've tested something and found that it converts better.
The formula is something like:
VisualImportance = AreaInPixels * BrightnessContrastToNeighbors * ColourContrastToNeighbors * ValueOfPositionOnPage
The top left of the page is more important than the bottom right. Too many colors make it difficult to control the color contrast between neighboring elements.
You should be able to squint at a page to see which things are most important.
i was one of the designers on loopt.com, and the reason i think most of these sites look the same is because we all go through y combinator hearing the same thing: "the number one enemy is the back button." we just don't have time to overload the home pages with too much stuff if we intend on someone doing something while they're on it. so i think all styles gravitate towards a similar highly-focused product-oriented…
This is the first I hear of CSS grid frameworks - I must look into them further.
Edit: By the way, your site looks great to me. I was trying to get at the thinking behind these designs, not to criticize.