greg-wood.co.uk

Of all the good looking websites out there, I think we've got most visual approaches covered. Clean, patterned, textured, aged, gridded, chaotic, the list goes on; every approach has been covered several times over. The days for being innovative with visuals as a whole are certainly numbered.

The Epiphany

To be outputting truly original, innovative design work on the web, I think we as designers need to be focusing instead on layout. You may be designing a site whose visual approach has been done many times before, but you could still be confident in it's originality if it's layout (or combination of layouts) shits on everything else of a similar genre. As a designer I love browsing through nice looking site regardless of the content, but I regularly find myself frustrated when I realise the layout is the same all the way through. The best way to keep a visitor captivated throughout is to challenge their eye from section to section; don't make your content difficult to find or your site overly varied, but certainly don't make it too predictable.

When designing Ben Saunders' North site, we at Erskine Design were very conscious of mixing it up. As you browse through there are obvious conventions that are in use, but it's varied enough to remain interesting all the way through till you eventually reach the contact page.

There is a definite need for some variety on the web. It seems a lot of people are getting too familiar with overused Blogger style layouts throughout sites, and this worries me. After all how logical really is it to present content that varies wildly in exactly the same way?