blog: 
Five well-designed sites
by Julian Kussman on 8.16.2011 in Advertising, Creative, Interactive Marketing 5
Here’s a quick look at what’s been inspiring me lately. These sites each show a great use of design, style, typography, and technology. Check them out:
This site breaks out of many norms with an animated X design and interactive flip books for their campaign imagery. When you have great photography, a site like this can be fun to put that extra icing on the cake.
Snowden Industries is a design agency whose site uses a familiar rotating content bucket and breaks it out of the grid everyone is used to seeing. The little touches everywhere show great care for their craft.
This fashion studio takes their site to the extreme in minimalism and crispness. A well balanced color palette and a good grid go a long way.
Here’s a subset of sites you don’t see very often, a literary review. They do a great job of simplifying their subjects and presenting them with lots of personality.
You probably didn’t expect to see Denny’s here but I have to give it to them. They’ve taken a great leap forward in design and style beyond any other comparable restaurants. You might even say, it’s so modern and fresh it doesn’t fit your idea of Denny’s anymore.
With the speed the web is changing, it’s sometimes hard to keep up. These sites are a small sampling of the new direction design on the web is taking. It’s becoming rich, animated, and lively. And all this without Flash! I can’t wait to see what’s hot next month.
comments
post comments
latest case study
When Monsanto Company needed a more effective and efficient way to communicate with growers and leverage brand consistent messages, it turned to Brighton to develop and execute an Exact Target campaign.
[...] Read my latest blog entry on the Brighton Agency site: http://blog.brightonagency.com/2011/08/16/five-well-designed-sites/ [...]
I dig the Denny’s design. But the “faded” content pages to the left/right of the active page is a little distracting… I think those non-active pages would benefit from even LESS opacity.
I also like the efforts they made for performance and SEO (late-loading the non-active content pages via AJAX). My only nit-pick (besides the opacity of non-active content) is that there’s a crap-load of external files that need to be downloaded to view the page for the first time: 22 separate JavaScript files, and 11 styleseets. All that could be minified/consolidated.
These are all fantastic.
I like the Lit Pub the best though. Vertical columns vs. traditional top to bottom scrolling is rad and for some reason, I love them.
I figured I’d let people weigh in first, but my favorite is Scotch & Soda because of it’s super-clean style. Check out http://www.awwwards.com/ to see where I get some of my inspiration.
I’m also intrigued by the design of the Denny’s website. With so much hip styling and social media flavor baked into the design of their site, the goal is clearly to drive engagement with the young, Web-savvy customer. That’s interesting because, as you point out, most every other comparable brand has created a safe, bland site that’s accessible to all demographics. The fact that they’ve created a site that’s almost “love it or hate it” despite being a mass-market brand is a risk you don’t see many organizations taking.