Pushing the boundaries of web design

Posted 17 May 2007, by Aaron

Do you remember creating your first website? I do, it was back in 1997 and I created a page on FortuneCity using it’s built-in page builder… Ho hum, how times have moved on.

Now we’re in a high bandwidth world of Web 2.0 and flashy AJAX technologies where almost anything is possible, yet nearly all web design conforms to some kind of expected layout. And this is fine: I want the screen to scroll down, not sideways; I want hyperlinks to be a different colour to normal text and I want them to be underlined; and I want the navigation to be at the top, not the bottom.

As discussed on my post about business cards, creativity at the expense of functionality, good design is based around the user and their expectations. If I don’t know how to to use or navigate a site, then it is a poorly designed site.

But what if there is a better way? If every site follows the same basic rules of layout, does design become stagnant? Who pushes the boundaries of design?

Over on Design Meltdown there is an article by Patrick O’Neil on atypical layout, which presents a number of examples of more unconventional web design. A couple that stood out for me include:

Addicted Flavours

Addicted Flavours

This site’s main navigation is a diagonal roll-over menu in the top left hand corner. The web just wasn’t designed for diagonals so it’s quite impressive that they pulled this one off. I have no idea how they’ve done it.

Haus Hoyer

Haus Hoyer

This website for a German cafe is in the form of a virtual coffee table, with a menu, a newspaper, a cup of coffee, all of which can be clicked on and dragged around. I’m sure this site would have Jakob Nielsen up in arms, but it’s actually quite good fun.

There are some other interesting examples on the Design Melt Down article that are well worth checking out. Some of the layouts do cross that line where functionality becomes somewhat compromised, but some are quite memorable, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?

Many thanks for the recent comments: Paul, Vivienne and Johno.

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Tags:Creativity, Design, Web 2.0, Web Design

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8 fantastic comments

These are some great site designs. Let Jakob cringe a bit.

Addicted Flavours is a very nice looking site. For your info, the navigation is a Flash file with a transparent background - which has then been placed on a high Z-layer to get it to appear above everything else.

I used a similar technique (although with a plain image) to draw attention to a viral compaign being run on one of my client’s sites at the moment: http://www.marketingsource.co.uk

And if web design was driven by people like Jakob Nielsen, we’d all still be using plain text and inline images. I’m not saying the man hasn’t contributed to modern web design (which he has), but not everything about Web 2.0 is rubbish!

For every 60 crap sites with AJAX and violators all over the place, there are another 40 that are accessible, coloured tastefully, with clear layout and decent sized text - all of which are part of the Web 2.0 ‘revolution’ too!

Thanks for hosting my daily rant…

I love the German Cafe site - amazing how the designer managed to think so differently from convention, some good links there too. I have a great book Web Design Index 6 which is just full of web designs from the conventional to the more wacky thats worth a look too.

I like the look of the Haus Hoyer site (there’s a very similar one, though better executed, with monkey in the title; just searched and couldn’t find it…) - been around for a while now and has been mimicked a lot. It’s not that practical, but as a piece of design and as a concept I like it.

[...] to Zep, The Paper Bull, Charity, Mike, Aaron, Tara, Lisa and Ludovic for your comments on recent [...]

The extended use of AJAX and JS in the Cafe site really gives an interactive experiance that indeed allthough not Web 2.0 standard it is a really REALLY beautiful thing to use and see.

I believe it is a successful design non the less. Web 2.0 is supposed to help us browse through data easier and faster. This site is about advertising a cafe and not sharing a database of information so .. thumbs up!

The Addicted Flavours looks really good with that spl diagonal menu.And the Haus Hoyer site is also amazing work.

Pushing the boundaries of web design

8 fantastic comments

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