I am pushing for a calm site thats simple and easy to veiw.
I went though 2 designs and disliked them:
http://www.sutabi.respoil.com/New/
http://www.sutabi.respoil.com/New/design2/
Now I am tring for another design:
http://www.sutabi.respoil.com/New/design3/
The layout vs color scheme match? I know its not much content but I am building on it. Once Sutabi Online is complete I am revamping Sutabi’s Workshop to fit this layout.
While I think I understand what you’re shooting for, I’m not sure you actually hit it quite yet. Notes:
Opening page: very clean with decent color choice, however the text at the bottom could be better formatted to match the buttons at the top. Actually, it’d probably be better without the text and centering the button graphics on the page (horizontally and vertically)
Sutabi Online: clean and straight-forward. The navigation menu could use some work, though. It looks… I dunno… stark, and somewhat amatuerish. Maybe something a bit more graphical (not big and annoying, but subtle, like the Opening page) might help it. Also, it’s quite annoying that your text doesn’t wrap at the window edge. Why you set it all in an h1 header tag with a width of only 351px is beyond me. Use headers for headers and the paragraph tag for the rest of the text, please.
Overall: the pursuit of something clean, subtle and functional is a very noble one. You’re opening page comes closest to achieving this. The interior of the site (in this case, the layout for Sutabi Online), however, definitely misses the mark. There’s simply doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of thought put into the design here. Prematurly wrapping text is also quite annoying. I don’t have a problem with text that is all bold, but not everything should be stuffed into a header tag.
Just my $0.02, though.
Thanks for the tips, the width will be considered greatly as well as a new menu.
I used the h1,h2,etc simply becuase IE 6 does no like to see made up tag in css, therefore not wanting to look the same from Gecko based brosers.
vs
Does that menu seem better? Just a quicky in blender…
I’d like to see something much more functional and clean, e.g.
*
3 minutes in Fireworks MX
*low quality
Heed the Carnivore… he has good suggestions. You might tweak it to match your color scheme, but the clean, simple, function look would suit your site quite well.
I think he’s got that right.