Amon Amarth

http://www.myspace.com/amonamarth

Amon Amarth are a melodic death metal band from Sweden who use Norse mythology in their lyrics and artwork which is reflected perfectly in their MySpace page design.

Behemoth

http://www.myspace.com/behemoth

The only word I can use to describe the cover of Polish death metallers Behemoth‘s most recent CD is stunning.  While they no longer use the cover art as the focal point of their MySpace design, it still fits the theme perfectly and is very clean and nicely done.

Cephalic Carnage

http://www.myspace.com/cephaliccarnage

Colorado-based hydro-grinders Cephalic Carnage use the morbidly colorful artwork from their upcoming full length album as the focal point of their design.  Dark and disturbing, I love it!

Decrepit Birth

http://www.myspace.com/decrepitbirth

It’s impossible to describe the enormity of California-based technical death metallers Decrepit Birth MySpace page design.  The album artwork of their upcoming album is stunning and the MySpace page is simply amazing to look at.

Despised Icon

http://www.myspace.com/despisedicon

While I’m not even remotely a fan of Montreal-based deathcore giants Despised Icon it doesn’t change the fact that their MySpace page looks incredible and flows nicely.  Well done.

Ion Dissonance

http://www.myspace.com/iondissonance

Ion Dissonance are another crappy Montreal-based death/metalcore band who I can’t stomach.  They’re also another band with an amazing MySpace page design.  The header is simply a large version of the album cover, but the artwork is so nice and the page layout is so cleanly done it’s impossible to hate this design.

Neuraxis

http://www.myspace.com/neuraxis

Back to Montreal I go with a look at technical melodic death metallers Neuraxis‘ MySpace page.  Again, it features the large album cover up top and a very clean layout.

Psycroptic

http://www.myspace.com/psycroptic

Aussie technical death metallers Psycroptic go with the “bigger is better” approach with their MySpace design.  Again, it’s just the large album cover up top, or rather, friggin’ enormous cover up top with a very clean design below.  Excellent use of colors throughout.

Slayer

http://www.myspace.com/slayer

One of the most well-known extreme metal acts in the world, Slayer, have one of the sharpest looking MySpace pages around.  Unlike most of the other pages listed above, this design only features a small portion of the artwork from the band’s most recent album.  The design itself is very clean, flows smoothly and is sharp and effective.

Squash Bowels

http://www.myspace.com/squashbowels

Dirty.  Disgusting.  Simple.  I really love the simplicity and feel of Polish grinders Squash Bowels‘ MySpace page.  There are some slight coding issues, but the overall design looks incredible.

Suffocation

http://www.myspace.com/suffocation

A few years ago I was the webmaster for New York death metal legends Suffocation.  A year or so ago they decided to abandon having a website and focused entirely on their MySpace page, which uses artwork from their most recent album and an excellent use of banners to market it’s release.

System Divide

http://www.myspace.com/systemdivide

System Divide is the side project of my friend and occasional design collaboration partner Sven de Caluwe from Dirge Design (he’s also the vocalist for Aborted).  The MySpace page is an excellent example of a more minimal design style.  No huge album cover, no gory artwork, just clean and simple and very effective.  Well done.

The Acacia Strain

http://www.myspace.com/theacaciastrain

Massachusetts-based crappy death/metalcore act The Acacia Strain are godawful.  They’ve also got one of the most amazing looking MySpace pages I’ve ever seen.  Forget the music, the colors, the attention to detail, the design… it’s as close to perfect as you can get within the limitations of a MySpace page design.  Definitely check it out, just don’t listen to their music because it will make you want to stab yourself in the ears with icepicks.

B-D, B-D, B-D… That’s All Folks…

So these are the pages I’m using for inspiration in my work this week.  Will the stuff I create turn out as well as these?  Some of the album cover art I have to work with is pretty killer and I’m confident in my abilities so you’ll all find out soon enough!

Check back next week for another batch of inspirational designs!  Even if you aren’t a designer, at least you can appreciate looking at purty pictures!

31 Three

http://www.31three.com/

I got the basic idea for the color scheme from 31 Three.  Very nice and clean design, with a unique layout compared to other portfolios I’ve come across.  Good work too!

Branded 07

http://www.branded07.com/

The portfolio of Rob Palmer features a very clean design, a couple of nice illustrations and a nice color scheme.

Color Cubic

http://www.colorcubic.com/

Nice dark portfolio.  Clean lines, nice layout and good contrasting colors.

David Hellmann

http://www.davidhellmann.com/

David Hellmann has one of the nicest portfolio sites I’ve come across.  Nice use of colors, layout and various jQuery effects.  He’s the man behind the excellent inspiration blog Make Better Websites.

Fajne Chlopaki

http://www.fajnechlopaki.com/

Fajne Chlopaki is the portfolio of a pair of Polish designers.  The site has a very unique look with an awesome header and great layout.  Great colors too!

Oliver James Gosling

http://www.goslingo.com/

The portfolio of Oliver James Gosling is one of the simplest, yet most clever, single page portfolios on the web.  It’s won many awards and proves that great design can be very simple.

Jeroen Homan

http://www.jeroenhoman.com/

I got the idea to use a big bold chunk of text at the top of my front page from this portfolio.  It’s very clean, very simple, direct and to the point.  Very effective.

Mission Bicycle Company

http://www.missionbicycle.com/

Not a portfolio at all, but still an excellent example of minimalist design.  I love the colors and simple lines.  This site gave me several excellent ideas.

Second And Park

http://www.secondandpark.com/

The portfolio of copywriter Tiffany Jones Brown is one of the nicest examples of minimalist design on the web.  Clean lines, good use of colors, very simple and effective.  I like it a lot!

Simone Maranzana

http://www.simonemaranzana.com/

I like to consider this a “fancy” minimalist design.  Very classic and elegant look to it with a good use of colors and a very nice layout.

Squared Eye

http://www.squaredeye.com/

Squared Eye have one of the nicest, cleanest, sharpest looking portfolios online.  It’s no wonder these guys have an impressive list of clients.  Great lines, great colors.  One of my favorites, by far!

Swedish Podge

http://www.digitalpodge.co.uk/2010/sweden/

Can you tell I love minimalist design?  Another amazing example that simplicity in web design can be highly effective.  Great use of infographics which has inspired countless websites since it’s release.

Truf

http://www.trufcreative.com/

Can you guess where I got the idea for my portfolio index page from?  These guys do great work and their portfolio reflects that.  Very clean, very simple, no clutter.

That’s All For This Week…

Check back next week for another selection of awesome websites.

Designing and developing a professional-looking website that is clean, accessible, functional, effective, highly customized, full-featured, dynamically generated, easy to navigate, update and maintain for a client with high expectations, a tight budget and a firm deadline is a challenge.  Building the same project for the most demanding, impossible-to-please and indecisive client possible, with no deadline and with no payment, is the single stupidest thing I’ve done in my 14 years as a creative professional.

I Am A Client From Hell

A designer’s harshest criticisms always come from within.  I don’t know of any designer that’s completely satisfied with any project they’ve worked on.  We are perfectionists and take a great deal of pride in the work that we do.  No matter how well any project goes, we always feel we have more to offer and there’s something we could have done better “if only I had just a bit more time.”  It doesn’t matter if that design impresses everyone else, inside we always strive for more, it’s just the way we’re wired.

Being a perfectionist is great for clients, they know everything we build for them will be done to the best of our abilities and, more often than not, will exceed their expectations.  Being a perfectionist when designing for yourself, however, is a huge obstacle to overcome.

When there are no restrictions placed on me, I’m free to purse “perfection” which inevitably leads to constant revisions and redesigns in a vain attempt to “get it right.”  The end result of this pursuit for perfection is an excellent piece of work, but one that ultimately took far too long to accomplish that left me over thinking and over analyzing my every move and caused myself far more grief than if I’d just followed my instincts from the very beginning.

While I’m very pleased with the end result, I’ve learned a valuable lesson throughout the process of creating Crooked Designs: when you design for yourself, you need to treat yourself like a client with a tight budget and deadline.  If you don’t, you’ll wind up like me, spending a year designing something that should have only taken me a week and having a great urge to bash your own skull in with a rock.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

That’s the best advice I can offer any designer working on their portfolio, business card or any other marketing tool to promote their services.  It’s also the philosophy I eventually adopted after many months of indecision.

In The Beginning…

This is the very first idea I started with after coming up with the name Crooked Designs last spring.  I wanted to design a logo that had a crooked feel to it.  It was a decent first attempt, but, as you can tell, I didn’t care for it very much and it didn’t go very far.

Then Inspiration Struck…

Walking through the mall last June I came across a bulletin board on the wall and noticed how things fit together.  I started to think about how that would look as a website, minus the cork board.

The design came together quickly and featured paper, tape, staples, pins, torn pieces of paper, I really got into the design and came up with a bunch of unique mouseover effects until I had something I was feeling pretty good about.

If I was smart, I would have been satisfied with what I’d done, cut it up and made it into a website right then and there and saved myself a year of grief.  Instead of doing that, I went online to see what other designers had done with their portfolio sites because I’m a moron and can’t leave well enough alone.

What I discovered is that there were several other designers using similar ideas to what I’d created.  The fact that my design is actually a fair bit different from the others I’d come across was irrelevant because I felt I was creating something that was too much like everyone else and ended up abandoning the design completely.  Did I already mention that I’m an idiot, because I feel that’s an important point to note.

The Search For Something “Different”

Deflated, I took several months off to focus on working on paying projects before returning to the Crooked Designs website.  When I was ready, I decided to build something different from my last design and started over from scratch.

The first thing I came up with was a slanted “crooked design,” but quickly came to the realization that slanting the text in HTML would prove more challenging than it was worth and moved on to…

My Next Stupid Idea

Which was basically the same as my last idea, only in black and red.

Finally, I’m Starting To Get Somewhere

For my next attempt, I decided to use the 960 Grid System and started by using straight lines and right angles to come up with something clean and simple.  For whatever bizarre reason I became obsessed with dashed lines and put them everywhere.  It still wasn’t quite what I was after, but I could tell I was getting close.

…That Looks Awfully Familiar…

After flipping through a couple of magazines I started to notice many of them had a similar layout and feel with a sectional title tab in the top left corner, clean text, lots of white space, the article title at the bottom of the page with the page numbers on the bottom left or right.  I really liked the simplicity and clean lines and decided to put it to use, which is also where I came up with the idea for all of the main text areas to have a plain white background.

As I was piecing it together I realized that the first full design I had completed had a lot of elements I liked and decided to combine the two looks together.  The end result is something that looks very similar to the bulletin board style I rejected outright last year.  Did I already mention that I’m a complete moron?

Putting It All Together

With the design now complete, it was time to turn it into a website.  Early on I decided I wanted the site to be dynamically generated using a content management system to make updates and maintenance a breeze.  Having already built a dozen WordPress themes up until that point, it made for an easy choice for which CMS to use to run the site.

I kept the theme clean and simple.  I didn’t want to use plugins that would add a bunch of junk code and possibly break in the future, so I kept all of the functions internal, including the jQuery slider and much of the functionality.  The end result is a fast loading page optimized for speed and performance while still being rich with features.

Let’s Get Pissed!

Now that the site is finally done a full 12 months after I started, it’s time to celebrate.  Hooray!  Okay, now that that’s over with, it’s time for the real work to begin while I pursue new leads for future projects.

For anyone who read this article the whole way through, I hope you learn from my mistakes and avoid similar problems with your own designs.  It’s important to trust your first instinct and see it through because, chances are, the first thing you come up with will be the best and you’ll end up saving yourself a lot of grief and frustration in the long run.  Granted, I say this after re-writing this article for the fourth time.  Son of a bitch!