Design Swag

I’m certainly a fan of Brooklyn Fare. Their site is a wonderful mix of crisp cutout photography, engaging copy and beautiful typography. The simple site navigation and friendly faces also make the site welcoming and intuitive.

Nest Living is a beautifully clean ecommerce site, which showcases designer furniture and lighting for the home. Page elements are muted and the use of white space lets the product images sing.

The idea behind DBH is very clever and the website is great too. Huge product images give you a real understanding of the t-shirt designs and the checkout process is wonderful. A super-human effort.

Generally, I find printer’s websites fairly dreadful - not Inkd however. I really like the fonts used across the site and the blue navigation really ‘pops’! The dropdown menus work really well and the work showcased on the site is also wonderful.

Apart from the odd exception, most websites aimed at dog lovers are fairly twee – this one certainly isn’t. A sweet colour scheme, clear typography, great products and some lovely images from Adam Queen make it a joy to use. Try zooming into their product photos… woof! 

Offset your carbon footprint at Carbonica. The Carbonica website has a ‘green’ feel through the use of card and paper textures, hand-drawn page elements and typography. I especially like the tree illustrations and fabric texture featured in the header and footer.

Redbrick Health’s website has some individuality despite it’s conventional corporate navigational structure. The illustrations throughout the site work really well in setting it apart from other health-related sites, which all too often feature cheesey images of smiling patients and kids.

It’s great to see local government embrace web accessibility and usability without making a site feel as though it was built in 1999. Too often sites of this nature fail to engage the user, but Cheltenham Borough Council have the web 2.0 mix just right, with little touches such as a Flickr group and YouTube videos.

Opera Magé sell Italian food on their lovely ecommerce site. The product photography across the site looks consistent and the colours used throughout work really well together. I especially like the footer navigation, dark wood background and cute basket icon. Meraviglioso!