They say the first bite is taken with the eye. If so, these appetizing restaurant websites succeed in whetting our appetites, inviting us to a savoury next bite. In these designs, color scheme and introductory copy show vastly different aspects of the restaurant experience. Moody warm tones create atmosphere, vibrant greens underscore freshness, and earthy colors communicate a relaxed, friendly attitude.

Because customers are increasingly using mobile browsers to make decisions on the spot, restaurant websites are doing a better job of communicating core information quickly. Similarly, full Flash websites with no mobile alternatives are seeing some decline. Especially interesting is how these businesses are improving their online menus by replacing PDF-only downloads with Web-optimized alternatives that are more readable and easier to navigate.

Sometimes a site can be visually stunning not so much because of the content but because of the lack of content. Though often attractive, this is a tricky style to pull off correctly without just looking like you’ve got a boring page.

Today we’ll look at 25 sites that we think got it right. First we’ll discuss why these designs work well under certain circumstances and then we’ll jump into the examples.

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Beyond Minimalism: The Power of a Focal Point

Minimalism is a huge trend right now. Articles and showcases abound on every design blog either praising its simplicity or bashing its shallowness. This post isn’t about minimalism. I’ll show you why with an example:

visit site

This is an excellent example of minimalist design. The design is clean, the content perfectly aligned and the typography simple. However, notice that there is still quite a bit going on in the page design, it’s just organized very neatly.

Though many of the sites below fit into the minimalism schema, our showcase today is more focused on the power of one. Creating a site that has a single strong focal point… and little else. The sites below prove that less can often be more, that great design doesn’t always mean multi-faceted, complicated or even highly structured.

As you look at these sites, think about how the focal point grabs your attention. Is it successful in making you want to explore the site? Does it make the site feel unique? Always consider the psychology of a design and how it makes you both feel and act.

25 Brilliantly Simple Designs

Enough talk! Here are the sites. I’ve put in my two cents on those that I found especially noteworthy.

Mary-Ann Foster

You would think a single giant circle would be pretty lame, but I actually love how this site looks. The colors saved the day here and bring in a lot of interest.

Simon Foster Design

An abstract shape with strong lines and lots of contrast makes for something that you can’t help but stare at.

Crealo

The text here is too difficult to read in my opinion, but the large graphic makes a strong statement.

Andy Shaw Peaxl Lucia Soto

You’ll noticed circles used heavily in this type of design. I think one reason we see this is because they’re harder to work into more traditional styles.

Dorotheu Captial G

I love the simple and fun statement made by the color bars, which double as the site navigation.

Norm.Architects.Copenhagen

Big, bold type is almost always attractive. Here you’re letting the font artist do all the work by providing you beautiful elements to display.

Martha Kelly Crowley Webb and Associates Bertelli • Biciclette Assemblate

A strong photo can be among a designer’s most powerful assets. Floating one nearly all alone on a page can make for a really dramatic design.

T O Y Michael Muller Ryan Hammond Adelle Charles

Adelle’s site is awesomely clever and really showcases both her personality and style. If you’ve got some really great photography of yourself, go build a personal portfolio using it as the hero.

Skinny Ships Emma Du Pille Jan Reichle

Check out that use of negative space. The choice of color and texture is really attractive as well.

CREATED 201 Studios Pandaweb Studio Bullet PR, Brighton PR company Ricardo Gimenes

Ricardo is a rockstar in my book. His homepage is super simple and just features a fun little self-portrait with a laundry line navigation area.

Fajne Chłopaki :: Portfolio :: Studio graficzne Keyonary+ The Shortcut finder! Show Us Yours!

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of the brilliantly simple designs above. Also be sure to leave a link to your own designs so we can check them out.

WeGrahics is a great looking site that offers subscription-based visual resources for designers.

From the navigation icons to the letterpress effect in on even the small text in the footer, there is a lot of attention to detail displayed throughout this design.

This design was featured on the 2nd September 2010 . It falls under the category of Design, and has a layout style of Grid.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

This is a very simple site with two key design elements: typography and color.

The type choices are really quite nice, I like the inset letterpress look. The colors are mostly uniform but still quite bright and friendly.

This design was featured on the 2nd September 2010 . It falls under the category of Corporate, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

I’ve done my own The VERY Basics screencast, but this full series from Google, targeted at just-starting-out beginners, would be a good place to go directly after my intro, to take things further along.

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Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek and geeky style or provide crisp, attractive icons for your modern and fashionable-looking interfaces. All the icons in this pack — 60 icons in total — are designed in Round Rectangle shape.

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed or rented. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

The XML Security Working Group has published five working drafts today. XML Signature 2.0, Canonical XML 2.0 and the XML Signature Streamable Profile of XPath 1.0 are part of an ongoing effort to rework XML Signature and Canonical XML in... W3C Staff

Legendary art director Roger Black guests on tomorrow’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped in front of a live internet audience.

Roger co-founded the following new companies: Webtype, creators of high-end fonts for online typography; Treesaver, a platform that uses CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the principles of responsive design to publish beautifully formatted content on any device with a web browser; Ready-Media, which designs templates for newspaper and magazine publishers (and attracts controversy); and Nomad Editions, a series of digital weeklies designed directly for mobile devices.

Roger is also a founding partner in Danilo Black, an international design agency he co-founded with Eduardo Danilo, and The Font Bureau, a leading type foundry he co-founded with David Berlow.

“He pioneered the use of computers in design, cut the best deals, and made himself synonymous with the modern magazine,” wrote Michael Wolff in a New York Magazine profile of Roger back in the 1990s, when Roger was the best-known magazine art director in the world. (Among many others, he designed Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fast Company, Advertising Age, and Esquire.)

He also co-founded Interactive Bureau, one of the biggest and most successful web design agencies of the dot-com era.

In his free time, Roger putters around in his award-winning West Texas vacation home made of recycled shipping containers.

Roger Black is an astoundingly prolific creative force; we hope you can join us for this Episode of the show.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of taping, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Photo of Roger Black at Happy Cog by Jeffrey Zeldman.

” In this post, we’ve rounded up 11 brand new fonts that are super high-quality.”

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“An extensive selection of UI templates, all in Illustrator format, and all perfect if you are a web, mobile or app designer who prefers to use Adobe Illustrator rather than the more commonly used Photoshop.”

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“The hundreds of featured icons here are diverse in their styles: glossy, hand-drawn, realistic, textured are among the design themes you’ll find. I hope you find a handful of icon sets that you’ll bookmark, download, and use!”

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When we first released the book Digging Into WordPress, we thought of some reasons why people might not want to buy it. A big reason is because tech books can go out of date quickly, especially when the subject is a fast-developing technology like WordPress. So, we fixed that. When you buy this book, you get PDF updates to it for life.

Today is just such an event. WordPress 3.0 has been out for a while now, and so it’s time for our second major update. This is the biggest one yet. We’ve combed through the entire book updating anything that was out of date or stale. We’ve also added a new Chapter 12, which is specific to the 3.0 update. The book is also sportin a brand new front and back cover!

If you already own our book in any form, this is old news, because we’ve already sent out an update email containing your new download. If you didn’t get it (spam filters happen), email sales@digwp.com with your original receipt and we’ll make sure you get it.

If you are considering it, but want to know more, you should check out the PDF sample of the book.

Regarding print version of the book, yes, they are coming back! It’s going to take us about a month to have them ready. If you’d rather not wait, you can buy the PDF now, and when the print version is ready forward us your receipt. We’ll send you a coupon code for exactly what you paid for the PDF to use in purchasing the print version. I’m sorry I spoke to soon on this issue. We are NOT offering any discounts on the printed version.

  

In celebrating the merits of free software and the excitement over this radical networked production method, an important truth is left unspoken. Networked collaboration shines in the low levels of network protocols, server software and memory allocation, but user interface has consistently been a point of failure. How come the networked collaboration that transformed code production and encyclopedia-writing fails to translate to graphic and interface design?

The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we'll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of "open-source architecture," "open-source university," "open-source democracy" and so on.

This is a crazy looking site that is a wonderful mix or random and structured.

I really like the unique way in which they showcase their work.

This design was featured on the 1st September 2010 . It falls under the category of Portfolio, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

Pancake is a way to receive and track payments and project deliverables.

The cartoony illustration style is fun and the bright colors work well together. The overall design is quite clean with plenty of white space.

This design was featured on the 1st September 2010 . It falls under the category of Corporate, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

This article explains the different values for the CSS white-space property, and how each one can be used.

A look at some of the webs more recent inspiring minimal website designs. It's a short list but worth checking out.

The Voice Browser Working Group has published a Working Draft of Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0. Voice XML is used to create interactive media dialogs that feature synthesized speech, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, telephony, mixed initiative... W3C Staff

If you’re not a seasoned web developer, it can be quite intimidating to approach a project where your client is looking for something trendy and interactive such as an Apple-centric slideshow.

Today we’ll teach you how you can create just such a project in mere minutes using some awesome free resources from around the web. We’ll walk you through ten super simple steps so even if you have little to no web experience, this project should be a breeze!

Like the article? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter to stay up on recent content.

What We’re Building

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how easy it is to build an awesomely animated, interactive webpage using completely free resources and very little effort to throw them all together. We’ll be using jQuery, a free iPad image and a free image slider plugin to accomplish the following effect.

• Demo Page
• Download Files

Step 1: Start the HTML

The first thing we want to do is get a basic structure for our HTML. Just paste in your typical HTML starter document. I used HTML5 below but you can use something older if you feel that it’s appropriate.

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset=utf-8 /> <meta name="description" content="description">   <title>Page Title</title>   <link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="style.css" /> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>   <!--[if IE]> <script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script> <![endif]-->   </head>   <body>   <div id="container">   </div>   </body> </html>

Notice that at this point I’ve included two links: one to a stylesheet and one to jQuery. Make sure you include both of these. Many developers also recommend including a local version of jQuery in case the linked version fails for some reason.

The only real markup we have at this point is a container div. We’ll add more later but for now this is perfect.

Step 2: Download the iPad

Obviously, we’ll need an iPad image. The iPad is simple enough that you could probably create your own fairly quickly, but we’ll just grab a pre-built version to speed up the process.

If you Google “iPad PSD,” the first option that pops up is an amazing free file from Teehan+Lax with not only the iPad itself, but a bunch of UI elements as well.

Download this iPad image and throw it into Photoshop to prepare for the next step.

Step 3: Prepare the PSD

Grab the layers containing only the blank iPad and throw them into a new document with the dimensions set at 883px by 535px. Set the background color to #1b1a1b and size the iPad so that the screen is approximately 460px wide.

To add some visual interest I threw in a shadow and reflection as well. Notice that the reflection fades out before hitting the screen portion. This simplifies things a great deal by canceling the need for a live reflection that updates with every slide.

Step 4: Start the CSS

Now that we’ve got our iPad background image, start a style.css file and set the iPad image as the background.

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }   body { background-color: #1b1a1b; }   #container { width: 883px; height: 535px; background-image: url(images/ipad.jpg); overflow: hidden; margin: 30px auto; }

As always, I’ve thrown in a basic CSS reset to make sure all the browsers are on the same page with margins and padding. I’ve also set the background color to the same color we had in our PSD. Finally, I threw in the iPad image and centered it on the page by setting a width and using “auto” for the margins.

Progress Preview

At this point your live preview should look something like the image below. As of yet there is only a centered iPad on a solid background but it’s already starting to look quite nice!

Step 5: Add an Image

Before we import the actual slideshow, we’ll want to get our positioning worked out with a single static image. Doing this now just makes things easier on us so we don’t have to position an active item that may or may not be working properly.

First you’ll obviously want to create or grab an image from somewhere. I just used a pic of my ugly mug set to 460 x 345. Throw your image into a “slider” div inside the container.

<div id="container"> <div id="slider"> <img src="images/slide-a.jpg" alt="" /> </div> </div>

Next, scoot the image into place with the following CSS. If your images are sized differently than mine you’ll have to tweak the margins to make everything line up properly.

#slider { width: 460px; height: 345px; margin-left: 212px; margin-top: 79px; } Progress Preview

With that little bit of coding your page should really start to take shape. My iPad looks much livelier with a full-color image thrown over the top of it.

Step 6: Download the Nivo Slider

jQuery makes building custom image sliders a breeze, but prebuilt jQuery plugins like Nivo Slider really strip down the amount of necessary work to around zilch and can often provide a beautiful and professional final result.

Go download a free copy of Nivo Slider. This easy to implement slider has nine transition options, supports captions and links, and is fully customizable. It’s a perfect example of the kind of quality freebies you can find on the web if you know where to look.

Grab the following two files from the download and throw them into the root directory of your page:

• jquery.nivo.slider.pack.js
• nivo-slider.css

Remember to link to these files in the head portion of your HTML. You should now have four linked files as in the code below:

<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="style.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="nivo-slider.css" /> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="jquery.nivo.slider.pack.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Step 7: Add More Images

Now that we have our slideshow, we’ll want to toss in a few more images. Nivo will automatically grab any images contained in your slider div so we don’t have to do anything special here but drop them in.

<div id="container"> <div id="slider"> <img src="images/slide-a.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="images/slide-b.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="images/slide-c.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="images/slide-d.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="images/slide-e.jpg" alt="" /> </div> </div>

Adding these will make your preview look all messed up but fret not, the next step will resolve this problem.

Step 8: Paste in the JavaScript

The Nivo Slider has a number of different settings that you can customize. To get a good feel for what these are, I recommend inserting the expanded example from the download page that includes all the available options.

This action equates to throwing the following code into your HTML.

<script type="text/javascript"> $(window).load(function() { $('#slider').nivoSlider({ effect:'random', //Specify sets like: 'fold,fade,sliceDown' slices:15, animSpeed:500, //Slide transition speed pauseTime:3000, startSlide:0, //Set starting Slide (0 index) directionNav:true, //Next & Prev directionNavHide:true, //Only show on hover controlNav:true, //1,2,3... controlNavThumbs:false, //Use thumbnails for Control Nav controlNavThumbsFromRel:false, //Use image rel for thumbs controlNavThumbsSearch: '.jpg', //Replace this with... controlNavThumbsReplace: '_thumb.jpg', //...this in thumb Image src keyboardNav:true, //Use left & right arrows pauseOnHover:true, //Stop animation while hovering manualAdvance:false, //Force manual transitions captionOpacity:0.8, //Universal caption opacity beforeChange: function(){}, afterChange: function(){}, slideshowEnd: function(){} //Triggers after all slides have been shown }); }); </script>

As you can see, there are options for setting the speed, transitions, hover controls, thumbnail previews and more. For our purposes, the settings above will work perfectly. Notice that the script has been set to run when the window loads up.

Progress Preview

At this point you should have a functioning slideshow inside of your iPad! This is awesome but there are still a few things we need to address. Namely, when we hover over the iPad we get some ugly text controls that would be much nicer as images. We’ll address these in the next step.

Step 9: Styling the Controls

Technically, we should probably create all these styles ourselves because the good folks providing the Nivo slider encourage us to do so. However, to wrap up this tutorial quickly, we’ll just use the sample stylesheet that they provide here.

Included in the download is a few images and yet another stylesheet to include in your HTML titled “custom-nivo-slider.css.” Rather than linking to a million different stylesheets, in practice it would probably be a good idea to combine these to avoid overlap.

The key thing you’ll need to do with this stylesheet is ditch the very first section of styles that appear as they will interfere with the positioning that we’ve already implemented. Below you can see how I commented out everything but the background color and loading graphic.

#slider { /* position:relative; margin:30px 30px 60px 30px;*/ background:#1b1a1b url(loading.gif) no-repeat 50% 50%; /*-moz-box-shadow:0px 0px 10px #333; -webkit-box-shadow:0px 0px 10px #333; box-shadow:0px 0px 10px #333;*/ } Step 10: Check Out The Final Product!

As you can see below, that final set of styles really finished off the slideshow nicely. We now have arrows that take us forward and backward as well as a horizontal list of bullets to navigate and track the progress of the slideshow.

Be sure to check out the live demo to see it in action. Also spend some time on the Nivo Slider site and browse the various enhancements that are available.

What Else Would You Like to See?

This tutorial sprouted from me finding some great resources on the web and wanting to share them with our readers. Leave a comment below and let me know if there are any other jQuery plugins or web freebies that you’d like to see demonstrated here and I’ll see if I can whip up a quick tutorial to get you going.

Wanna share the article? Here’s a handy shortened URL that you can paste into Twitter or Facebook: http://ow.ly/2xtcZ

” In this post we’re going to look into some of the more popular web design styles, and further examine why they work.”

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