Discussing design 177 - Zen City Morning

Design # 177:

Zen City Morning
by Ray Henry, United States


(+) The positives:

• Eye-catching layout, good use of colors design. I really like the layout, it's both practical and fun to look at. The content and navigation areas are both spacey, allowing the viewers easier access to the information. The colors give out such an energetic and vibrant mood, very fitting with the theme of the whole layout. I'd say this is a very straightforward but effective web layout that would work extremely well for a personal blog or personal website that needs plenty of space for links and content.
• Browser-friendly, fast loading time. These two are very important, especially loading time. The graphics and content of this design load fast and it is also browser-friendly as the layout will stretch and position itself nicely in larger screen sizes.
• Nice web effect on the background. I'd say the transparent background is what drew me into this design at first. Most large websites shy away from fun effects because of their heavy contents and large amount of traffic bandwidth. But having one or two cool effects/functions on a website can really attract users' attentions. In this case, the transparency on the main content really stands out and makes the design more dynamic and creative.

(-) The negatives:

• The clouds on the background are distracting. The layout could have been better with a plain or gradient dark blue background. It can loose the boring looking clouds. I just think those clouds are not contributing much to the overall design quality and are somewhat unneeded, since they look too geometric next to the more organic graphics of the whole layout. Those clouds don't really belong.

I don't really have any more negative things to say about this layout. Overall, it's a very well done design.