We’ve recently had some down time at the office while waiting for client feedback and confirmation on new projects. So I decided to do something constructive with the time on my hands, and made a couple of {radiiate} wallpapers.

You can download the wallpapers by clicking on your screen size below the preview images.

Eclipse Wallpaper

• 1920 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1440 x 900
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 1024
• 1024 x 768
• iPhone

Freedom Wallpaper

• 1920 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1440 x 900
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 1024
• 1024 x 768
• iPhone

X Wallpaper

• 1920 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1440 x 900
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 1024
• 1024 x 768
• iPhone

2008 is coming to an end and all of us at {radiiate} are very much looking forward to a much needed holiday! It’s been a great year in the web design world, with loads of awesome designs popping up all over the web. So with that in mind, we decided to compile a list of the one hundred websites that inspired us most during 2008. One hundred is a lot of websites, but to be honest I could add 100 more to this list. There are just too many great designs online!

We know that these kind of lists are very popular and that they’ve been popping up all over the web for the last few weeks. But we decided to take a stab at it anyway - and we’ve got a 100 sites to feature!

Top 20

We were going to order all the sites in this post from 1 to 100, but found it a bit hard with so many to choose from. So what we did was select our 20 favorite favorites and listed them from 1 to 20. So let’s say these are the cream of the crop!

1. Komodo Media

Komodo Media

A strong and simple layout with great attention do details make Komodo media a winner in our minds. We love the “island vibe”, and the “foliage-o-meter” is a very fun and clever extra!

2. Kyan Media

Kyan

The soft colours combined with strong typography and plenty of white space make Kyan Media’s portfolio site easy to look at and use. They have an awesome portfolio that offered us a lot of inspiration while designing the {radiiate} portfolio. Be sure to click on the little worm in their footer!

3. Max Voltar

Max Voltar

Max Voltar is has a very minimalistic design. We love the use of gray scale with limited use of colour to highlight links. Websites in serif typefaces with a great layout and ample white space are always beautiful!

4. You Love Us

You Love Us

This site makes use of beautiful background images and a nifty Javascript sliding technique to deliver a unique and interesting user experience.

5. Jason Santa Maria

Jason Santa Maria

Jason is a web design legend, so you would expect his personal website to be awesome, and it is! Different layout and stylesheet for every article he publishes, need I say more?!

6. AdaptD

AdaptD

We like the bold use of color and typography on this one. The layout is unique and well structured. The banners going across the header are awesome!

7. Twirk Ethic

Twirk Ethic

Twirk Ethic is a design, music and culture website. The design is very classical / elegant with loads of interesting details all over the design. We like the string, center-aligned header graphic and the symmetry it gives the site.

8. Astheria

astheria

Again strong typography and loads of white space makes Astheria a really great design. The strong contrast between the pink and grey really draws your attention to all the important stuff.

9. The Lippincott

The Lippincott

The Lippincott is a classic grunge design. We love the use of textures, torn edges and illustrations as it gives the site a very strong “handmade” feel that goes great with the purpose of the site.

10. The New York Moon

The New York Moon

The New York Moon is an online magazine. The “old-school” newspaper feel is very fitting and the interesting use of typography and layout really does make this site feel like an online magazine.

11. Alexandru Cohaniuc

Alexandru Cohaniuc

Web designers’ personal portfolios usually offers something special as they have more freedom to experiment than with client work. Alexandru Cohaniuc’s portfolio is no exception. The layout is something different and I really like the use of Javascript to display his work.

12. Space Collective

Space Collective

We like this site for it’s strong grid based layout. It’s very clean and easy to use. The Javascript slider at the top of the page is nice touch. I love the animation on their splash page!

13. Rockatee

Rockatee

I really love grunge design, and Rockatee is another great example. The textures and watercolor-like overlays gives the design a more “human” feel.

14. Viget Inspire

Viget Inspire

Viget Labs is a web design and development agency. This design is for their blog that features on front-end web design and development. The background landscape is awesome, and I think it’s really clever how the sidebar merges with the header. By doing so it blends into the background of the site, leaving the content column to grab the most attention.

15. Gary Nock

Gary Nock

Gary Nock is a musician, and this is his personal website. It’s another grunge classic, and with me being a sucker for paper textures, I couldn’t not include this site! I love the big header with plenty of pictures of Gary. You get a pretty good idea of what Gary and his music is about as soon as the site loads.

16. Wearable Print

Wearable Print

A very clean and elegant design. The subtle background texture is great and the design makes good use of Javascript for the slider boxes on the homepage.

17. Future of Web Apps

Future of Web Apps

This is the website for Carsonified’s very popular “Future of Web Apps” conference. This design has a brave color scheme, but pulls it off well. The extra large typography is great and the quirky illustrations add a friendly feel to the design.

18. Ainsworth Studio

Ainsworth Studio

A solid, classic layout and serif typefaces make this design beautiful. The big watercolor background texture adds interest to the design without being distracting.

19. Danny Blackman

Danny Blackman

Danny Blackman’s personal portfolio site combines Javascript sliding and awesome illustration for a interesting user experience. You have to check this one out for yourself to see what we’re talking about!

20. Colourpixel

Colourpixel

With web design it is often difficult to break the mold and come up with something unique, layout-wise. I think Colourpixel does a great job breaking the usual web design mold, whilst not being over-complicated and still being easy to use and read.

Honourable Mentions

Our top twenty featured our favorite favorites designs of the last year. We hope you enjoyed looking at them! But if you thought we were done, then think again! Below are 80 more absolutely fantastic designs that did not make our top 20, but we still felt they deserve a mention on here. Enjoy!

Wilson Miner

Edit Studios

PixelfuzeViget Extend

Web Design Ledger

Web Designer Depot

We Are Not Freelancers

Vogue

Tylor J Reimer

Two December

Training by Collective Idea

Top Gear

Tony Geer

Tim van Damme

TicToc

The Rissington Podcast

The Oleg Blog

The First Twenty

The Design Studio of Mike Precious

The Darling Tree

The Blizzards

Take the Walk

Studio 7

Patrick Keefe

SPD

Sofa

Silverback

shnme

Sensis

Saturized Studio

Sascha Eggenberger

Radu Ceuca

Pure Volume

Power to the Poster

Paiko

Ordered List

One Mode

Nuedo

Nue Media

Monty Lounge

Mix

Miles Dowsett

Medicon Media

Matt Dempsey

Matt Brett

Macalicious

LeetGeek

Langgatan

Karma

I Love Colors

Upstruct

Go Media Zine

Ginger Monkey

Giant Creative

Galan

Apilot

Function

Freshest

Lee Munroe

Fortyseven Media

Elliot Jay Stocks

Digital Mash

Design Jobs On The Wall

Andy Montoya

Design 82

Delicious Design Studio

Checkout

Campaign Monitor

Babylon Design

Brian Murchison

Coda.coza

Berit Sømme

Art of Dying

Art4Web

Ali Felski

AdWorks!

Abiblog

365 Days of Astronomy

80/20

2Pitch

So at this stage, we’re in the process of building a niche (mini) social network for a client (using WordPress, bbPress and a lot of custom functionality we’ll be building onto this) and we’d spend the last 5 / 6 weeks doing mockups for the project. Now, in my mind we would’ve loved to establish the design framework, style & branding of the site before moving onto development, as that is more time / cost efficient for us - but the client has now requested us to move onto development instead (and thus not do multiple iterations for the mockups), since they’d like to get down ‘n dirty with the design and get a feel for it by using it. So this is agile development then: develop & design on the go.

Now, my only concern in this regard is: who is responsible for the costs associated with the duplicated time / tasks associated with this process?

The Problem

Using agile development in this way, is fine, because we’ll start with simple grey-based XHTML / CSS wireframes which we’ll integrate with the PHP functionality. And we can then spend days / weeks going in a direction until we need to add the styling / branding again, only to realize that the “framework” we’ve built won’t work with the desired branding. Now this could’ve been avoided if the mockups were finalized and the ideas basically conceptualized in full prior to development. This means, that we’re left to re-do a lot of work, because of the choice of project techniques & workflow…

Considering that 99% of web projects have very strict budgets (since the client needs to earn a ROI on it), who is then responsible for the additional costs? Or I can even ask: are the additional costs even justified?

So agile development + clients = #fail?

My feeling is that an agile development mindset could well work for client projects, as long as everyone is on the same page with regards to the costs involved. See, agile development typically works great for developers working on their own web apps, because if they run over time budgets (due to duplicated tasks), then they need not please explain to a client about the overrun on time / costs. But with a client that situation is slightly more tricky, as they would be more sensitive to increased costs and extended timelines.

Honestly, I’d still prefer not to have to go there and avoid doing full-on agile development. Especially since we are so design-minded anyway - I’d much rather spend the bulk of our project time working in Photoshop, than a code editor. But that’s just what we do at {radiiate} - how do you feel?

(As a sidenote: the client referenced above has been great about this and I do believe that we’re on the same page with regards to the duplicated tasks and additional costs. The client has been very open-minded & fair in terms of what is reasonable and what they need to pay extra for… That said, this is still a very new situation for us and we are learning as we go - so we’ll see how things pan out towards the end of the project.)

So we would not have been surprised had many of you thought that {radiiate} never existed and that it only lived in my own imagination. Well, that can not be disputed anymore, since we have finally launched the new site, after months of procrastination and hectic client schedules.

We must say that we’re pretty proud of this one, as well as the projects we’ve collected in our portfolio. Both FRESH01 & Foxinni have done an amazing job on this design (I’ve been project director or something like that) and this truly shows where we’ll be going as a team on our way forward.

I’d like then to put the microphone down and hand it over to you all… Let us know what you think, whether you find any bugs or just say anything else… Enjoy!

Here’s thus a small list of a few portfolios that influenced us most whilst we were designing our own… Just a bit of inspiration ya’know…

Studio7 Designs

Kyan Media

Matt Dempsey

Thuiven

Bainbridge Studios

Ginger Monkey Design

Tony Geer

Cabedge

In the end, we decided not to include all of our work (considering we obviously did not only work on 9 projects during 2008) for a variety of reasons:

• Some of the work was a bit pre-{radiiate} in the sense that I had personally worked on those projects (when {radiiate} had already existed), but FRESH01 & Foxinni had not officially joined me yet;
• This meant that we felt that some of the work didn’t represent our current skillset and quality;
• Along with this, we believe that not every project is created equally (due to the project’s limitations - not our lack of commitment to the project) and we needed to showcase only our best portfolio items;
• And lastly - no client is going to work through a portfolio of 500 items anyway…

So with this in mind, we’ve limited our current showcase (which we’re launching the new {radiiate} website with) to only 9 projects from the past year. I believe that we’ve only just started to do our best work yet and some of the projects we’ll be adding in the next 2 / 3 months will increase the overall quality of our portfolio significantly.

This portfolio is however a step in the right direction, since we really needed to get some kind of portfolio up (I’m sick of having to send clients JPEG examples on request all the time). I also believe that the portfolio along with the design of our website will start attracting even higher calibre clients and we really look forward to meeting loads of great new peeps in the new year through these channels!

The Splash Screen... Epic #fail

So suffice to say, but {radiiate} has been suffering from a very similar problem during the last few months: “death by splash screen” or “splash screen of death”. I’m sure that anyone that has followed my blog in the past (and thus knew about {radiiate} before we officially launched this portfolio), would know all about the familiar - and exceedingly boring - splash page we used as a placeholder, whilst we were procrastinating on getting this site live.

Even though this had been a moot point in the office for the last couple of months; loads of client work has just made it impossible to get around to designing this portfolio. This coupled with the fact that my blog was still delivering a handful of new project leads on a daily basis, meant that the design & development of the {radiiate} site was continuously moved down on the to-do list.

The question thus is whether the brand itself (and the reputation thereof) has suffered some kind of negative impact due to us using the splash screen for so long!?

The design showcases LIO’s trendiness, whilst allowing them to easily publish their new thoughts on everything related to socio-political environments anywhere.

So part of the project brief was to spruce up the aesthetics of their online presence, by using the design style they’ve established in their printed publication. Along with this, we developed the whole website on a single installation of WordPress, to allow all of Fairlady’s writers to chime in and keep the website neatly updated with relevant and exciting content.

The theme design helps conveys the “quick-and-dirty prototype” feel of the 30-year-old IDEO design firm’s environment and culture, in keeping with the blog’s focus on hands-on, DIY technology work. Have a look at the blog and the videos on it to get an idea of what we’re talking about.