how much illustration can you take???

these guys put together this totally mental site that makes you work hard to figure out what it does. They tucked in some very nice surprises - my favorite is a "panic" button that launches an article on stress reduction in a new window. Very funny, and actually useful at the same time.

I can't pronounce it but it really kicks ass

This little site, with it's simplistic background & nice white-set-pretty-opaque bg for a column website has been making me wish I owned a club (that also carries it's own record label) all freaking day long. I want one, okay? Sometimes all you need is a full page beautiful illustration, some cool, interesting music, and some pretty impressive talent to thumb through. Less is more right here - me gusta mucho.

watt turns is up!

Watt is a club in Rotterdam. They set up this site with a header that rotates. This little trick is done throughout many sites - a changing image w/ some text, but NOT the whole flippin' header of a site! Very innovative. The grand lesson: take something that works in terms of basic function (like rotation) and apply it somewhere else to see what happens. Note how the rest of the design is built to accommodate this massive rotating graphic.

chaos never looked so good

So okay, these guys mixed up the header with images, illustrations, and straight up objects, and then layered in the content beneath that. It can be so flippin' hard to make such a cluttered mess look appealing! But I love it. They did some nice things with color, and there kind of is a decent hierarchy happening due to the larger header, and smaller body copy. The nav elements get a little lost (cause they're too small & aren't very interesting), but otherwise I like the way this guy feels.

sasssy BG image

So okay, any of us who have designed a site with massive background images can understand cracking this nut. The guys who designed the SASS site created a pretty massive column to dump text info. It lacks pictures. I think that this minimalist approach is a pretty decent way to go. There's few other images to compete with the nice background one, and while the columns might be a little on the long side, it still seems to work okay.

design can carry a cool site

So this site for Blondie (bar in Spain) has very little by way of cool programming or functionality, but it still totally rocks. The secret? Super cool design. It's fun & playful, & gives you a nice feel for the personality of this place.

matter throws down some sweet color work!

This site for matter (in London) is simple but cool. There's an interesting pattern with light in the bg, and as you roll over the nav, the colors change, all of which work fairly well with the pattern color. The columns change content every several seconds, which keeps the whole thing looking fresh.