An earthy, elegant portfolio site for a custom landscape designer.

Another great site by the very talented team at fortysevenmedia.com. This design uses all the basics well, well placed texture, very sharp typography, subtle color balance. It also has that “finished” feel since there’s a lot of complete detail work throughout the site. The sub pages are as nice as the home page too. Great work!

Love the strategic layout that highlights the latest product. Colors, typography and layout balance is top-notch.

While there’s nothing special about this layout, it’s not revolutionary, and i’ve seen this formula before, it has completeness and is “finished” looking. That goes a long way in instilling trust with the visitor. The detail work in each corner of the page is finished/complete and the presentation is professional. It’s the small things like this that can take an ordinary layout and make it really work.

RocketFuel provides professional website design, a simple content management system, powerful internet marketing, and accessible web expertise located in Memphis, Tennessee.

I really love this site design. There’s not a lot going on in regards to fancy effects or over the top design, but it’s organized well and has cleverness to it. The illustrations are fun and memorable - I love the “call me” illustration in the footer.

There’s so many lessons to take away from picking through this design, I know i’ll be taking some ideas away for myself. What are some others that you see?

A design portfolio that features a clean and minimal design, though portraying the designer’s work in a simple and highly accessible manner.

Really good simple looking design portfolio site. I like how the portfolio is right there as the first thing you are presented on the homepage. That’s what this is all about so just put it right there front and center. I do wish there was more info on each project, loading them up in a lightbox seems the easy way out. The blog is a really great read too, it’s definitely going in my RSS feed reader now.

I think this submission is a worthy candidate as not only does it have an original, attractive design and is easy to use, the whole site passes Strict XHTML validation.

First impressions when I arrive on this site are good, so half the battle is won already! I am staying for a look around, definitely the sign of effective design. A warm and appealing colour palette combined with a strong & consistent typographic style with some image replacement goodness making use of a visual hierarchy drawing the eye slowly down the content works well. I like the use of flash on the homepage strapeline, and the fact that the others are static indicates a good balance between drawing the eye and usablity/accessibility issues. Very clear navigation bar at the top. I particularly like the strong services sub menu which focuses on what this company offer. Might be nice to have clearer indication of where I am on the site though, some visual persistent navigation clues within the services section or titles might help. They have made use of breadcrumbs but only in the portfolio? Which brings me nicely to the portfolio layout which is excellent, it is a triumph and the use of the computer monitor while not original has been done well. The information is very scanable.

The footer offers easy to see calls to action and there is an obvious tie in between header and footer marrying the whole page together. The white swirls contrast beautifully with the well balanced grid layout. I like the icons with the faint shadow, who said drop shadow is dead!

Weaknesses:
Although the review is about design, design is about usability and a poor implementation of wordpress as the blogging platform can impact negatively on this. A rewrite module is a must for friendly URL’s .Weak design of sidebar in blog section when compared to all other aspects of design on the site makes me think it was a bit of an after-thought. Site built with DW templates (sorry I’m a handcoder and a snob! lol)

Found via @simmy & @meaganfisher.

I’m in love with http://finaleyes.org — this sort of simplicity is ridiculously difficult to pull off. Great work, @weightshift.

Make sure and view it in Safari 4 for some webkit style neatness. Here’s a cool link for more info on this idea.