Sorry kids… Rengirl went on an impromptu 2-day getaway but now that she’s back… here are the critiques. Also: take note of the “general comments” below.
comicGeek
Very clean design and layout, transitions and effects are smooth. The text on the orange was a bit harsh on my eyes, but it wasn’t too major.
Nice and clean, everything looks good (although the orange/grey combination is a bit tired) and loads fast. It’s a good site.
nice, 2nd place…wait a while before submitting again…
I really, really like the look and pheel of this site; The layout is incredibly clean, pro design, nice loads. My only suggestion to his site is to do away with the little bouncing smilies. they detract from an otherwise outstanding site. I love the way his pictures load, I love the detail given to this site; Theres little doubt in my mind how this made it to SOTW. and in spite of the bouncing smilies, I am casting my vote for this site this week. One of the things that won me over was the free download of the source philes. Remove the bouncing smilies, and in my opinion there is no doubt as to the winnability of this site. My vote goes to comic geek, a hard pressed decision, as there were many others this week that were nearly just as good in my mind.
comic geek got my vote… all in all, Comic Geek executed all of the points I want to see in a website, including fun and smooooooothness points…
I critiqued this last time it was entered, so everything still goes. I thought it was great. I love the layout and design. And it ran smooth for me.
Good: usable, well-designed, cute eggs. Not so good: bouncing eggs seem a little out of place… don’t fit into environment, it might be that the pastel colors don’t suit the stronger orange and greys.
raphidae
The graphics on this site is very clean and the music is catchy. At first glance, I didn’t like the horizontal scrollbar, but after I clicked on the menu, I noticed that it has a horizontal sliding effect similar on Lost’s site. The downside to this site is with the text, some of the pixel fonts are a bit hard to read.
Very original work! I love the pixel art.
original layout, section titles/headers not visible enuff, lacks color, contact form: at least select the text, or better empty the fields onSetFocus!! 3rd place ex-aqueo
Another fantastic entry. No question again how this made it to SOTW. This week or soon enough, this site will win. The effects are awesome. Great transitions, great color, great use of the screen area. Perhaps another font would do better, but it looks great as it is. The load times are excessive, and took a considerable amount of time on my wireless high speed connection; I wonder how they might fare with a 56k. But forgiveness comes when the load times are rewarded by such a rich, easy to use interface…
didn’t like the horiz navigation…
I noticed that some of this is HTML. I almost took that into consideration, but then I noticed that all of your main content is indeed Flash. So that makes up for it. If I may make one suggestion though, hide the scrollbar if you are going to do this sliding thing. I didn’t know the sliding thing at first and I would drag the bar then click on a navigation button and so your page would jump around, and this caused some lagging because my system had to catch up. I do love the layout and design, and the pixel art is excellent. Could use just a little more color though. For some reason it reminds me a lot of http://www.drububu.com/
Good: clever animations, entertaining, well-designed. Not so good: what’s with the biological charts and illustrations?
webshocker
Like comicGeek’s site, this one had an orange background with black text as well, but it was less harsh on the eyes because the solid orange is concentrated into one area and the rest is transparent. I like the transitions on this site, but I think it would also be nice to have a preloader displaying some kind of progress either in percentages or a loading bar.
Nice design agency site, everything’s well done. But nothing really exciting here, we’ve all seen this 10 times…
why is the “enter” btn not a button? why do minimized windows disappear when going to another section, makes a good idea useless! what’s the button next to min/close in the windows titlebar for? clean, nice, good logo, 1st place.
I like the basic layout, but do not like the use of popups as a normal transition. Personally I hate sites that do this. I am always wondering what this little popup will be, and despise their use, but then thats me. The colors are good, but the transitions are a bit choppy. I can tell by his work he can do better than this in his transitions. I like his custom movie loader and viwer, that was great. His movies were cute and quite original, a highlight of the site. While it is well done, it is not extrordinary. I can tell by the skills they show, they have the capability to do much better…
once I figured out enter wasn’t enter… nice site
The window blur-ins were obviously low quality imported images or some sort. I wasn’t too fond of how pixelated it looked. I don’t see any point to having a draggable pop up window to house your content. You barely have any space to drag it, and your information could have easily been incorporated into your layout without the draggable.minimizable/closeable pop up window. I thought your section transitions were nice though, and the color scheme is pretty nice as well. Interested effect having a mouse shadow as well. Although it tended to follow my mouse not so smoothly.
Good: cleanly executed design and user-friendly interface. Not so good: splash page… I keep clicking on “Enter” and nothing happens.
timhlu
There isn’t much to say about this site, with the competition it’s going against, it has no chance of winning. The design is simple, but the text is blurry so it no longer has that professional feel like the other sites.
Nice little site. The design is pretty good, even though the snow might be a little bit out of place. Nothing fancy, but nicely done (except the font). It’s funny, I remember when you posted the Apollo 11 site on this forum… a loooong time ago.
too small, too empty, no contact form, it’s in a pop-up, no need to use flash for this site! 7th place
This is a pretty basic generic site; Although I can see from some of his earlier sites, things I would absolutely love to see tutorials for on Kirupa, like the color pad, and I also liked the Appolo 13 werk. This site lacks any umph or depth to make it SOTW. I would like to see them enlarge these ideas, skip the popups, and try a main interface thats more interesting.
why a popup? text is real blurry
Nice little layout, and nice colors, but with the competition the outlook isn’t too good. Your navigation text is small and blurry and your standard text seems to be blurry too. Also, your loop seemed to shut off on me after a certain amount of times looping. Perhaps this is just me, I don’t know. It only happened to me once or twice.
Good: simple, well-designed. Not so good: I don’t feel that flash was used to its full potential here.
UNFLUX
Like raphidae’s site, this site uses pixel fonts as well, but it was easier to read since the text are in laid out in blocks or chunks so the viewers eyes remains stable and is able to concentrate on one area at a time. I love the color scheme and the graphics on this site, very clean.
Neato. It’s fast, colorful, very clean, I like it.
hate the colors!! blue, yellow, grey…?! the contact form’s submit button provides NO FEEDBACK. still nice design… 6th place
Another great site as well. I hope I do not sound overly critical here, but it is a peeve. We have all this space; We pay extra for larger monitors so we can see the screen better. And almost every new flash site ignores this great capacity of space. The only thing I don’t like about Unflux’s site is the incredibly small buttons. And again it is a personal peeve but worth mentioning because it’s so important; Make buttons large and easy to get to, click on, etc…There are people with seeing disabilities, arthritis, and many other things that make it hard to scroll around with a mouse, and lose patience when web designers ingnore open space and opt for hard to buttons; I am picking on Unflux as I think he can take it if this is copied publicly. His site is outstanding, superb, excellent, except for this, my faupau…I hope all the web designers out there decide to take up that option of space and use it wisely and inclusively, as it is such a terrible waste…Unflux’s site will in my opinion become SOTW material someday, just not this week.
transitions tended to be lengthy by the end of the visit.
I love the layout, the colors, the images, the transitions. Call me a dope, but I just love this site. I love the minimalistic style.
Good: excellent use of space, color and typography. I believe this is a good example of a 2advanced-inspired site. It doesn’t copy or imitate… but I can see some influence. But there is definitely still some originality to it. Not so good: can’t really think of anything…
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