Finally put the finishing touches (actually still putting them) a few days ago. This site is a big jump for me design wise, and I’m pretty proud about it. My goal was to offer a far bigger amount of information in every catagory available. For example, there are song descriptions, and people desciptions, something not found on the last version. I tried to kick the graphics up a notch this time around as well.
A few points.
Some of the elements on the site are meant to be out in the open “easter eggs”
I bet the grammar might be screwy, I’m working on it.
What do you think? Bugs? Suggestions? Strange Browser renderings?
I agree, your title font looks well screwy - very difficult to read. It’s not so much the characters themselves as the kerning: they’re running in to each other. Try spacing the characters slightly apart.
The text in the right side column seems to be shifted over a little bit, just off center. I don’t think that’s by design.
Folks are right about the header text; that font is a little too hard to read. If you kern the letters a little wider you might get more readability there. I understand that real graffiti lettering is tight like that, but since your working with pixels instead of a cement wall, you might want to adjust for your audience.
As for the design as a whole, one suggestion that I would make would be to set a background color for the page, something that would show on the white space around your content, so the content would stand out more vs. the (blank) rest of the page. Choose a muted tone that complements the rest of your color scheme, either very light or very dark, so there’s enough contrast with the border and the content space.
And I’m not sure about that green under the bio links; doesn’t seem to work with the rest of the color scheme. You might be better off just leaving them on the white background like the rest of the content. (But the bios themselves look pretty nice).
The only problem I see is that the bios and the ‘Info’ for each track don’t quite fit in the popups, and there’s no scroll bar or size adjustment for the window. (I’m not too keen on being forced to take a popup anyway; I’d rather be able to open the link in a new tab. And I’d like to know in advance where it’s taking me, instead of seeing some empty javascript tag.)
NATL, um, yeah it slightly off by design, it’s exactly as I intended.
Yeah I think the background color could be played around with, I see what I can come up with. You’ll just have to trust me about the green thing, black icons on white looked like it still needed something, plus there some artifacts I’m hiding. I might try and calibrate the shade and see if I can come up with something a hair in either direction. I always though red, green, and blue looked nice together, so that was my intention.
You’re rjk, the windows are slightly off. IE and Firefox seem to buffer each a bit differently, so I stuck a black line around it and whatever white space is left over will have to be left over. I could try and play with the window size numbers and try and make it a little better looking, but I’ll probably give it a week, as I can’t stomach looking at the site for a few days. I myself was a bit depressed to have to sink to using javascript, but I couldn’t think of a better way to display all the crap without seriously having to rethink the navigation. If I made a frame in the middle, the news content would get nuked, but a full page for a small description looked kinda strange. If javascript is disabled, then a full page pops up (well it will after I make the secondary pages).
I appreciate all the honest feedback, it’s been quite helpful.
NATL, um, yeah it slightly off by design, it’s exactly as I intended.
Yeah I think the background color could be played around with, I see what I can come up with. You’ll just have to trust me about the green thing, black icons on white looked like it still needed something, plus there some artifacts I’m hiding. I might try and calibrate the shade and see if I can come up with something a hair in either direction. I always though red, green, and blue looked nice together, so that was my intention.
You’re right rjk, the windows are slightly off. IE and Firefox seem to buffer each a bit differently, so I stuck a black line around it and whatever white space is left over will have to be left over. I could try and play with the window size numbers and try and make it a little better looking, but I’ll probably give it a week, as I can’t stomach looking at the site for a few days. I myself was a bit depressed to have to sink to using javascript, but I couldn’t think of a better way to display all the crap without seriously having to rethink the navigation. If I made a frame in the middle, the news content would get nuked, but a full page for a small description looked kinda strange. If javascript is disabled, then a full page pops up (well it will after I make the secondary pages).
I appreciate all the honest feedback, it’s been quite helpful.
I really preferred the design of the old site better. To me, this one just feels way to cluttered and busy. It also doesn’t utilize the full extent of my large resolution screen which might also have something to do with it.
IIRC, I just left everything at the initial defaults when I installed Firefox. I think locking it to your choice of text size would be a mistake; the browser should control absolute sizing, while the HTML suggests relative sizes. That allows for people with bad vision or any other features the page designer isn’t aiming for. For example, Shalmanese mentions that your page doesn’t use his higher screen resolution.
Letting the browser display things as the user wants does make your design job harder, but making a page look good under all reasonable conditions is worth the trouble, IMHO.
Take a look now, I changed a few things. I’ve made the background colored off white, and I changed the font to make the headers a little more legible. I know I won’t be able to make everyone happy, (luckily that’s not my goal either), but you guys have made some good points, which I’ve tried to implement.
I myself was a bit depressed to have to sink to using javascript, but I couldn’t think of a better way to display all the crap without seriously having to rethink the navigation. If I made a frame in the middle, the news content would get nuked, but a full page for a small description looked kinda strange. If javascript is disabled, then a full page pops up (well it will after I make the secondary pages).