Web Design Critique #52: Goldenboy Media
Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.
Today’s site is Goldenboy Media, a web design agency in South London.
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About Goldenboy
Goldenboy Media is a young and creative design agency building inspired websites and innovative user interfaces, currently located in South London. We consistently try to bring design concepts to life with prototypes that look simple and beautiful. What seperates us from other design agencies is the attention to detail, every project we work on, we aim to design it as if it were our own.
Here is a screenshot of the homepage:
Layout and Alignment
Goldenboy Media is a professional web design agency so it would be quite the disappointment if they didn’t have a great looking website! Fortunately, they have done a great job on their own site.
The main content area is 1,000px, nice and wide. It gives the site a very big feel. The layout and alignment are very strong, most of the text is left-aligned and the layout swaps between two and three columns as you scroll.
Much of the content adheres to a simple grid that’s right at 940px wide, a very common size that works extremely well for splitting up the content into columns.
Color and Typography
The color scheme throughout the site really sets the tone and feel for the company’s image. This is important to nail and lots of designers over-think it. Goldenboy decided to go with a mostly grayscale theme that looks quite professional and has nice contrast between the darks and brights.
A single color, #9F8723, is used for emphasis throughout the design. With the mild gray palette, this works perfectly to draw your attention to key areas.
The typography combines a nice, bold-condensed font with the easy to read serif typeface Georgia. The pairing works really well and is surprisingly readable given the amount of italicized text used.
One negative note here, the headline font uses Cufon so it’s not very selectable. I’d much rather see @font-face being used for font replacement. It works well across browsers, uses pure CSS and maintains all the benefits of live text.
Slider
I’m always a sucker for a good image slider, especially when you’re a company that needs to visually show off samples of work. Goldenboy has decided to display closely cropped and slightly rotated screenshots of some of their work. The tight frame gives you a sense that they put a lot of time and effort into making all the little details just right.
The slider itself is the popular Nivo Slider. This awesome utility is effortless to implement. To grab it and use it on your own site, check out this tutorial.
Repetition
Another great design tool we see being used generously here is repetition. Once again, we see the same color being used for emphasis and to take it even further, a grunge effect is usually applied as well. Even the circle shape is repeated again and again.
So here we have repetition in color, shape and texture, a textbook use of this simple tool. By doing this, the designer is making it really easy for the user to look around and get a feel for the key points of the page’s message.
Services
As an example of carrying the repetition across pages, check out the Services page. Here they’ve taken the icon lockups on the home page, which contain minimal text, and expanded them into fuller explanations.
I really love this idea and I think it’s masterfully executed. It’s important to not overload your homepage with information that can overwhelm your visitors. Give them a taste and then direct them to dedicated pages containing more information about what they want to know.
Footer Design
While the design of the page stayed fairly safe throughout most of the page, the creativity really stepped up in the footer. This is just a really attractive piece of design that really catches my attention and is by far my favorite thing about the page.
Your Turn!
Now that you’ve read my comments, pitch in and help out by giving the designer some further advice. Let us know what you think is great about the design and what you think could be stronger. As always, we ask that you also be respectful of the site’s designer and offer clear constructive advice void of any harsh insults.