most inspired

1. 
   loewydesign.com
   You thought only Charley Brown was a blockhead, a block layout literally as well as just in the grid sense. Tetris fans might like this one, I know I do.
2. 
   designdisease.com
3. 
   lukelarsen.com/
   Large stylized horizontal website with Scrollto.
4. 
   kttunstall.com
   I have to admit I found this one as I was looking for green-earthy themed websites. I’m a huge fan of KT’s, her site is pro all the way. She’s a bit of an ecology activist as well.
5. 
   taptaptap.com
6. 
   rockyourlook.com
   A major flash offering from retail giant JCPenney, upload your karaoke webcam footage, or just check out the other videos and mega-doodle-art.
7. 
   rockatee.com
   This one made my day, from the German lady designer Maleika Esther Attawel! Her previous site made it’s way into the ExpressionEngine showcase. This design again very, very nice.
8. - no image available –
   dawghousedesignstudio.com
   Hoping this one works, they were having bandwidth problems, no doubt to all the viewing by gallery peeps, hence no screenshot yet.
9. 
   stjamescourtartshow.com
10. 
    takemefishing.org
    A fishing portal is a fun project to work on, this one really shines!
    That’s 10 for this week, I’m outta here… Have A Great Weekend Everybody!
    Rock Your Design Projects!

Bonus Site!

westben.ca
What the heck, here’s 10 + 1 for this week, just happened on this fresh launch that’s got such excellent execution on a lot of levels over at the EE forums. I’ll get the jump on all the other galleries with this one, my fame and fortune can’t be far behind, I’m fast approaching “Legendary Status” already

PS: Handcrafted /w tlc.

Technorati : weekly website gallery
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Technorati : Weekly Web Design Gallery
Del.icio.us : Weekly Web Design Gallery

1. 

   http://www.stoutlabs.com
   A web development & design laboratory, minus the mad scientist, plus the ExpressionEngine CMS.

2. 
   http://www.catchdigital.com/

   A flash animated plasma-like background with various foreground layer alpha effects. Throw in some sIFR, jQuery accordion menus and sexy graphics & icons, and you’ve got yourself an edgy, modern and trendy website.

3. 
   http://www.thierryschlegel.net

   Interesting use of color in vivid blue and taupe, texture with some 3-D and splatter elements, and navigation choices retaining a hover color to show categories of works. Beyond these elements the site could use a bit of background information about Thierry apart from the resume pdf. Thierry’s also bought in to the “Save the Developers” movement, which makes perfect sense to me on a portfolio site.

4. 

   http://www.arcinspirations.com
   From the list of “Top 10 JavaScript (jQuery) Powered Sites“

5. 

   http://www.jameslaicreative.com
   It’s no secret that I like, grungy worn-look websites and jQuery. The intro slide-in/fade-in jQuery transition, on load is the deal breaker, making this one-pager a must add to the standards gallery.

6. 

   http://klinkov.com
   This one is an awesome layout, again jQuery functions carousel combined with realistic artist palette textures! Hmmm… this one give me some big ideas for a personal project, on my someday todo list.

7. 

   http://www.vegaone.de
   Cool times 10 on the wow-scale, this vibrant portfolio flash site featuring some splatter-riffic graffiti art!

8. 

   http://www.jamesb-dj.co.uk
   James B asks, “What’s Hot?”…sexy DJ beats, trendy stuff, great typography.

9. 

   http://mamie-bouillabaisse.com
   Another stylish portfolio with a neon palette on black.

10. 

    http://sacas.net
    Click around in the Flash intro header on the homepage, it’s really sort of awe-inspiring even if you don’t speak the language, did I see a w000t in there somewhere!

Technorati : CSS, Web Standards, Website Gallery, Weekly Feature
Del.icio.us : CSS, Web Standards, Website Gallery, Weekly Feature

1. 
   Growldesign.co.uk
   Freelance portfolio of Hertfordshire, UK’s web designer Jenna Smith, a well rounded code specialist with all of these in her skillset; PHP, MySQL, XML, XSLT and jQuery -”yea-a open source!”
2. 
   Awayback.com
   One of my favorites this week, Freelancer – Amrinder’s site, who’s self-described objectives include building “technically intelligent, visually impressive and freely creative websites”!
   If the portfolio site is any indication, then yeah I’m feeling the “visually impressive” bit, nice work.
   Note to self: start using some sIFR, it looks just excellent here in the headings.
   Typography overall very nice.
3. 
   Phunkn.com
   Phunky-funky, talented Creative Director -Jason Chieng’s site.
4. 
   NickHand.net/
   Graphic design from the far North of Alaska, Nick’s site utilizes an expansive grid and some Flash header treatments. The flash is a bit sluggish here, and as a result not very smooth tweening action, but it could just be my machine. Anybody have a 1Gb chip of old sdram laying a round, give me a yell …
5. 
   SpaceColorado.org
   Space exploration from the mile-high city Denver, Colorado.
6. 
   Indent.co.za
   Innovative bold geometrical layout, with a sci-fi futuristic console vibe.
7. 
   ConsiderOpen.com/
   A Seattle web design portolio, further proof that “Seattle still Rocks“.
8. 
   http://www.tourtracker.com
   A new AOL brand website hit the streets this week, this one a great new music and concert resource TourTracker offers a whole host of original content and user submitted articles and inside-scoops about your favorite recording artists, as well as Tour Dates and ticket information for huge national tours as well as the pub down the street, incredible. Mubs confides in me he was spending some time in Manhattan, NY the past couple of weeks helping build this site. Thanks for turning me on to this one Mubs, it Rocks! Everybody get out and catch some live music, you know you want to.

Quote of the Week:

“Believe in your dreams, for they can only take you to a place once unimaginable … ”
-Jason Chieng’s site

That’s about it for this week, happy Independence Day to anyone residing in the United States, Mubs in NY, and David B. from over at LogoPond down in Cajin country N’awlins, Lous’iana, and Simon across the other big pond at the reins of Stylegala. Shout-outs to all my friends scattered across the “Creative Planet” also, and enjoy the weekend, you know I will.

Peace out!

Technorati : blog, freelance, gallery, site of the day, web design
Del.icio.us : blog, freelance, gallery, site of the day, web design

Locomotivation.com

Home of the new jQuery parallax scroll plugin. Very nice. There is a random sequence on the homepage header; either telegraph wire poles or a clipper ship sliding across the logo with the backgrounds in parallax.

Adaptd.com

Adding this one to the gallery because “Simon says…”

KoodooCreative.co.uk

Omnia.ae

Large hand-drawn scroll-to design, featured on Smashing Mag’s “hand-drawing-style-in-modern-web-design-volume-2“.

Riders-network.com

Ethnoport.pl

Flash and a radial theme, pretty nice, percussive audio background loops. The main menu really dances to the drum beat loop, mouse in-and-out a few times and you’ll notice the red arrows when the menu is active and the entire menu pulsating when it’s not active… ok maybe I better lay off the late night ice-tea?

Exploring this one and you will find a very unique radial navigation and sub-nav menus, you shouldn’t need a guide like Indiana Jones for this one, it’s very intuitive. Clicking on a radial menu and the next button slides in place right beneath the mouse cursor, for effortless navigation.

More Inspiration:

For more inspiration this week be sure to check out the lightondark.com gallery, for some particularly inspired sites featured this week!

1. 
   GetFirefox.com

   Stop whatever you are doing right now… and go get Firefox 3!!
   Come back and finish looking at the other sites on the short list this week after you’ve upgraded your “fox”.
   The website does not disappoint either, it’s friggin’ awesome!!!
   I had the last site in today’s list (youlove.us) redefining my definition of “…what is cutting-edge” until I saw firefox three that is… sorry Spencer.

2. 
   BlurDigital.com

3. 
   JeffSarmiento.com

4. 
   CokeStudio.com.pk

5. 
   Aespec.co.uk

   I keep being reminded that big fonts is a design trend . Keeping that in mind, here’s some love for a site with exactly that. Well that and validating xhtml strict code, a grape puple-people-eater robot, and a pretty darn good portfolio & blog …all running on the latest version of Wordpress. The intro fade-away speech bubble is done in Flash, and highlights the fact that this is a company that loves to serve it’s clients!

6. 
   YouLove.us

   A swee-ee-t experimental website, love the colors and transparency.
   There must be some in-house expertise here, the layered graphics are just smashing.
   Dude we love U, Youlove.us, cutting-edge to the max.
   Rock on!

Campingilfrutteto.it

Ernesthemingwaycollection.com

Trackmypeople.com

Evernote.com

Free utility site with membership features.

Trevorexter.com

Enter the Exter, decent blog site of a mellow cello fellow,
with the highlights done in yellow.

Toucouleur.fr

Rawkes.com

Design shop and blog home of Rob Hawkes – Web Designer and Mission Control.

NJrebel.com

Welcomebrand.co.uk

Awesome random images load on the homepage, click refresh a few times to load some other backgrounds. I wonder if the designer has a print background, these beautiful webpage spreads could easily be published in high-gloss magazine layouts. I want to explore this site some more!

Oh this is swee-ee-t, the backgrounds are fixed in place while clicking a link slides the foreground content up and down via a new javascript library maybe.

I am loving this one! My only slight critique is I don’t see a link after visiting the page sections, to click to go back to the top menu.

CraigWickersham.com

This one appeals to my inner architect geek. Maybe it’s just because Mike Brady, the widowed architect of “The Brady Bunch” was just so cool? Lovely architect drawings and the graphic backgrounds & color scheme are a great design “blueprint” of understated design elegance.

ClipperRoundtheWorld.com

Consider this one a technological preview and a study in the spectacular use of all sorts of electronic communications. Technologies including blogs from the yachts, global-positioning GPS data tracking on Google maps and video/audio casts – all direct from the yachts. It almost reminds me of a video game control panel interface, love the design.

MattWilsonJazz.com

Imagine a client giving you this focus for the design brief…
“if you think you’ve made it crazy, go crazier…if you think it’s goofy, make it goofier.” —well there ya go then, sounds like a zany gig!

Ameravant.com

A pleasant design firm layout from sunny Santa Barbara, California. The site is easy on the eyes, strong grid use, and I like the light grey to manilla reverse hover treatment sitewide. The blog also appears to be one for your feedreader
aka bloglines.

The Ameravant logo “A” reminds me just a bit too much of the Ad Council logo, but that’s just me, nice site overall.

TheRealestateConciergellc.com

A dramatic white-on-black site with a touch exotic flair, beings the subject matter features some tropical locales, Panama for one.

NYmoon.com

Vintage publication styling, and some interesting writing works. The current May/June 2008 edition has some excellent interactive map graphical features. It looks to be educational as well as inspiring reading, just might add this one to my Rss reader under
Urban Landscape.

GraphicEyedea.co.uk

An interesting and albeit “green” website design, very nice. An up and coming female design team of freelancers, could it be?

Logistetica.com

An elegant amalgam of logics + aesthetics, plus a healthy dose of javascripting abilities to do some cool wow-iness. Their About page says they don’t like working with private persons, control freaks or jerks, and prefer to work with clients who pay on
time… geez how picky is that, lol.

CatalystStudios.co.uk

Sketch artistry and illustration in this Wordpress powered blog, along with some mad science as is evidenced in the logo.

From the Catalyst Studios (CS) about page… “Formed in 1998, Catalyst Studios began with a singular vision – to be the fiercest band of mole-wranglers in Texas.” Hot damnnit …there goes my dream of being the first mole-wranglin’ web designer in the
West, if and when I ever move out West.

ExpoCooperative.com

A fun mix of flash and web standards design. Check out the About page, it really sort of blew me away. The About page cutline is “We Believe that Inspiration is Behind All Good Design.” This page is a complete mirror image of the sites layout, a behind
the scenes peek, if you will. The posterized high-contrast cutout treatment of the graphic urban elements complete with neon colors and paint drips and splatters is über awesome!

FacesOfOolong.com

Web Design is a matter of Kung Fu mastery young grass hoppa’, Photoshop your head onto the body of a true master and you will soon see! Flash intense site.

NewConcept.hu

The top spot this week goes to the weblog and portfolio of Szabolcs Bakos a small-town Hungary web designer. Bold use of color, typography and just a smashing user interface, love this site. NewConcept.hu is also doing a decent job of leveraging the ExpressionEngine publishing platform.

Devotchka.net

A nostalgic flash animated website, this one from the Symphony gallery, where they had this to say about it…

“Since Symphony is based in XML, it’s the perfect tool to drive a Flash site. The band can add news, shows, albums and songs all through the Symphony back-end. All the content is then formatted into XML documents that are loaded dynamically by Flash. I can’t think of any CMS in existence that would have allowed me to do this as quickly and cleanly as Symphony did.” A nice testimonial for flash dev’s.

5pieces.com

A longtime ExpressionEngine resource, and the second redesign in less than a year. I like this version even more than the previous incarnate, nice job Vinnyio!

eight6.com

This seems to be the week for new Wordpress sites. This one, eight6 is for a one-man design studio in Detroit, founded in ‘98 by Noel Jackson. One possible reason for all of the new Wordpress sites is the milestone release of version 2.5+ back on March, 29th.

DarrenHoyt.com

DarrenHoyt.com gets a redesign, and a fresh new take on who or what is the Darren Hoyt blog. Namely a decent resource for all things web design and Wordpress.

Antiphrasis.com

What can I say Iguanas, Wordpress, and Validating Xhtml are all cool!

Pzgi.com

An interactive and web design agency, using a black and neon green color scheme for the ultimate in digital effect!

Vacation Travel

Sessions.collectiveidea.com

A hands-on training session event site for the Ruby-on-Rails set, taking place in scenic Holland, Michigan later in June.

Macallanridge.com

A Great Smoky Mountains luxury resort hot spot and sweet website.

A Research Goodie!

Powerset.com

A smooth design and excellent super-fast and easy research tool utilizing wikipedia and others. They have done a sweet job on the user interface of the results page. Can you say whick-etty – wicked – wiki!!

Contest of the Week:

Crestock.com Snoop Dogg Wallpaper Contest

How ’bout this schwag-a-mania special… official Crestock Design-A-Wallpaper contest! If your Wallpaper Design is chosen as the official Snoop Dogg wallpaper winner, you’ll be Ego Trippin’ and rolling in the shizzle mo-nizzle!

Min.frexy.com

Vietnamese talent Min Tran, a one man web design Tour de Force, is fresh and sexy …well not sure about all that, but it’s a nice site from a talented designer.

Flavert.com

Flavert Media Lab’s Hypothesis Version, über cool!

CitrusDesign.ro

Rounding out the international flavored portfolio sites topping the gallery this week, this one from Romania.

CarnivaleDuvin.com/2008/

Cajun Carnivale Ringmeister, Emeril Lagasse does it again! Emeril’s web dev team throws some more “Bam” on it, with his Foundation event website, nice work.

LadyandSons.com

Another Cooking Channel personality Paula Deen –the “Queen of Butter”, gets a new site this week. This one a relaunch on the ExpressionEngine CMS. Is it lunch yet?

CoalMarch.com

Located in Cary, NC, in the Research Triangle Park – one of the country’s fastest growing centers of software development and new ideas with SAS, Red Hat, and Epic as neighbors, sounds like an interesting place.

DerekSholl.com

A grungy layout for a country musician, with a spacious layout and typography.

FixieConsulting

A mootools accordion graces the homepage of Fixie Web Consulting. The transparent header treatment of the accordion sections makes it appear to be something unique. I love the design… on the other hand, a user not familiar with accordion menus, might not know what to click. A little more visual cue on the accordion link styling might be a good idea.

TheSeen.biz

A standout Flash portfolio, vivid colors, typography and textures.

EllisLabs.com

And finally trailing the pack this week is “The Boss’s” new site (and you thought the boss was Bruce Springsteen). The EllisLabs site got a redesign by none other than Rick Ellis himself. The new site is clean, spacious and eloquent. Be sure to check out the comic book Superhero art treatment of staff members on the Our Team page. Contributing the illustration work was one, Cliff Persaud. Derek Allard talks a little about the illustration works and shows pencil renderings for each in this post,”GREATEST about us page of all time“.

Quote of the week:
“Code is art… art is Code.”

WebDesign Is Art wallpaper

New Kid on the Block

Mjijackson.com/Shadowbox

A new media lightbox script Shadowbox—a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application built entirely in JavaScript by Michael J. I. Jackson (I think the JI stands for Jedi Intellect) . This script works independently of your other javascript frameworks, and there are already some adapters for the major js libraries, jQuery, etc. Check out the demos…

There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.

StevenGleave.co.uk

Steven Gleave a freelancer from Kent in the UK, working to master and showcase modern trends, nice showcase here.

Freshe.st

Freshest Web Design in Northern Ireland, is one static page, with one designer at work -Bill Morrison, but the 1-pager with a fresh slant on a linen canvas background is a thing of beauty. I really love the clean layout and vector floral style illustration, expect more content from B.M. in the future.

YeahStyleDG.com

Another freelance portfolio, this one from Alvaro Casanova (aka Yeahstyle), a 21-year old Uruguayan graphic designer based in Santiago de Chile. This one is a different take with the thumbnail images on the homepage almost reminding me of piano keys. A very colorful site.

Designchuchi.ch

A May 1st reboot site… a great grid layout and a good mix of graphic elements.

Ijsfontein.nl

Another designer portfolio, this one’s not in English and looks to be from Amsterdam. The flash transition text treatment, and abstract design are quite nice here.

Qualeasuamania.com.br

Late to the party, I should of had this site added for last weeks celebration of Cinco de Mayo. Click the Sim button to enter the site.

ArtSpaceTokyo.com

From the website intro, “Art Space Tokyo acts as your 272 page personal guide and interpreter, connecting you with the neighborhoods and figures behind some of the most inspiring art spaces in this colossal city. …”

GingerMonkeyDesign.com

You’ve just got to love a site called “Ging-ah-r-r… Mon-k-a-a-ay”, aka the “Auburn Ape”.

The vector-illustrated swirly-floral and color graphic designs appear to be mostly print works and of rockstar quality, to which we say… “keep up the monkey business gingerMonkey…”. In December of 2006 Ginger Monkey’s head honcho, Tom Lane got to do a Computer Arts magazine cover for the “Future Trends” special edition, further evidence of his Rock Star skill-set. Aww-sch-ome sch-tuff ginger monk-ee!

AcrossAmerica.robWeychert.com

There’s still time to catch up on Rob’s travels on his 8,600 mile route across America during the month of May. Rob is no slouch in the design field, be sure to check out his domain RobWeychert.com for other interesting projects and esoteric shenanigans. Besides if you follow Rob’s adventure you won’t have to spend your stimulus check on the gas money and get stranded a third of the way through the journey.

JasonReedWebDesign.com

Mootools assets used to great effect and XHTML 1.0 strict valid code. I like the carousel within the tab, and the fact all of the sliding panels resize if the text is expanded. Many sites fall flat on this issue.

Cool Link of the Week:

Processing.js

From the “Brain Trust” known as John Resig this week, John is sharing the fruit of his labors over the past 7-months of ultimate geekery producing a possible flash-killer or certainly a viable alternative in some cases.

This project known as Processing.js taps the power of the Processing visualization language using javascript and the Canvas element, to produce it’s quasi-stellar effects.

Don’t miss the demos:

• 91 basic demos.
• 51 larger, topical, demos.
• 4 custom “in the wild” demos.

You may have heard of John, he’s the Javascript Ninja who invented the ever popular jQuery .js library.

Thanks for sharing this with us mere mortals John —fantastic stuff!

Rant for the Week:

Why can’t we get a good deal on Computer Arts magazine subscriptions here in the U.S.? Be on the lookout for bootleg .pdf copies of back-issues, or better yet maybe there will be some DVD collections soon.