Topic: Uber-Clean

Here's the result of an evening's work... A lot of thought has gone into it though - It's far from being finished, I'm just lookin for some opinions on the site as it is so far.

What I'm going for with this thing, as you can see, is an Uber-Clean design... perhaps too clean still. I'm happy with it so far.

With this site I've done something I never have before - Flash text replacement, something I've learned about from shauniman.com.

The color used on the site is a step away from what I usually do as well I think the blue used in the headers and other text might be a bit too subtle, making it seem as tho I'm just using the one color and shades of gray. Anyhoo... some opinions would be appreciated

http://javadevil.com/home.php

(Edited by Lurch on 07-15-2004 09:37)

There is a thin white margin between your pink logo guy and the content area. Would look better if that wasn't there.

using FF .9.1 Other than that it looks pretty good. Should there be any flash on this page. You made reference to flash text replacement and I"m not sure where that would be happening on this page.

Interesting. I like the feel of it, the "cleanness" of it. But then I tend to be somewhat of a minimailist when it comes to web design. Holistically, I would say that my reaction is very positive, but there are a few minor things that nag a little bit.

Like MalFunkShun said, the thing white margin is distracting. I don't necessarily thing that you have to take it away, though. I think you could make it bigger if you wanted. It's just that, the way it is now, it almost looks unintentional. So I would either eliminate it or add more white space (like mebbe ten pixels or so... you've got plenty of room there).

The other thing that bothers me as the ungodly hugeness of the logo. I'm looking at it on a 1024x768 screen and, with the white space above the logo, the actual content ends up starting more than halfway down the page. I realize that it is square, but it's just way too huge. I'm thinking maybe half that height, and lose some of the top margin.

Having the logo on the right and nothing on the left is unconventional, and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. I think that if there was less wasted space, I might feel better about it. In other words, I don't think it's the left-right positioning of the elements that bugs me as much as it is the vertical positioning.

Overall, though, I like the attempt. Clean is good. Don't feel the need to sully it with all sorts of nifty bells and whistles.

Oh, yeah, I also have no idea what this Flash text replacement thing is... I suppose I could go check out that site you mentioned... maybe later.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

Interesting. I like the feel of it, the "cleanness" of it. But then I tend to be somewhat of a minimailist when it comes to web design. Holistically, I would say that my reaction is very positive, but there are a few minor things that nag a little bit.

Like MalFunkShun said, the thing white margin is distracting. I don't necessarily thing that you have to take it away, though. I think you could make it bigger if you wanted. It's just that, the way it is now, it almost looks unintentional. So I would either eliminate it or add more white space (like mebbe ten pixels or so... you've got plenty of room there).

The other thing that bothers me as the ungodly hugeness of the logo. I'm looking at it on a 1024x768 screen and, with the white space above the logo, the actual content ends up starting more than halfway down the page. I realize that it is square, but it's just way too huge. I'm thinking maybe half that height, and lose some of the top margin.

Having the logo on the right and nothing on the left is unconventional, and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. I think that if there was less wasted space, I might feel better about it. In other words, I don't think it's the left-right positioning of the elements that bugs me as much as it is the vertical positioning.

Overall, though, I like the attempt. Clean is good. Don't feel the need to sully it with all sorts of nifty bells and whistles.

Oh, yeah, I also have no idea what this Flash text replacement thing is... I suppose I could go check out that site you mentioned... maybe later.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

For the XHTML and CSS I would qualify the links. As it is right now other than the URL I would have no idea what they are about.

Dan @ Code Town

thanks for the replies - just a quick note before I'm off to work.. more later...

you'll notice that the fancy Headers are in a Trajan Pro font. They aren't images. That would be the flash text replacement

Um, don't know how that double post happened up there... I'm positive I only submitted once.

And I kind of figured that the headers were what you were talking about, but I'm still not exactly sure what you did. What does "flash text replacement" mean?

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

Lurch uses Shaun Inmans technique to replace text with an flashfile which shows this text in any font you choose. Shaun uses an Flash file and some javasripting to replace the text.
The replaced text (which shows in the choosen font) is still selectable and indexable.
This is an very interesting technique.
Read shauns articles on this matter (do not forget the comments).
http://www.shauninman.com/mentary/past/ifr_an_fir_alternative.php
IFR revisited
IFR in the wild
Not Your Vanilla IFR

While Shaun's solution is based on flash and javascript there is an serverside solution which uses PHP and javascript to be found at ALA:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext/

<edit>After switching off javascript all the headers are still visible though they lack the special font-type</edit>
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Support Justice for Pat Richard

(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 07-17-2004 13:12)

IFR is so far sort of esoteric. Outside of Inman's own postings, I haven't run across anyone else who has done this. (Or admitted to it publicly!) I'm impressed! Nice job.

Very very clean and stylish; it's almost beautiful.

I like the headers.

I dislike the hot pink, maybe another color like lime green that isn't pink would suit it better?

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"Dawn is nature's way of telling you to stop using that stupid quote."
- me.

tntcheats - thanks I'm thinking of having several different colors for the logo and css, like lime green, orange, blue, and others

Steve- thanks.. i've seen a few sites using IFR, but not many considering how easy it is to implement. I found myself wanting to try it for a long time, and when I finally did, I was surpised at how easy it was.

Suho- about the ungodly hugeness of the logo... My original design had it taking up a full quarter of the design. Through the process of the design, the content area got a little more room, but the logo stayed very large. I'm just trying to get out of what I usually would do with this site. Same goes for the positioning of the logo and content. If I shrink the logo and right hand column, it will make us all feel more comfortable with it of course, because it would be more like what we always see. I'm just trying to create something a little different here. Not crazy-different, just a little.

Malfunktion - yep... white gap will have to be fixed

I don't really mind the logo size. Maybe if there was some less white space at the top it would look smaller, though. (Have a margin of atleast 15, mind you.

I think it's just a thing about the style of the website.

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"Dawn is nature's way of telling you to stop using that stupid quote."
- me.