Fresh Air Farms - Event Location

I stumbled across this site while looking up a logo I had ran across in Communication Arts Magazine (Design Annual 54) and on the web. Their logo and business card had caught my eye. When I got to their site, I fell in love! 

I don't usually go for sites that are all gooey with romance or any of that stuff, but, this one nabbed me.

The minute you go to Fresh Air Farms, music starts to play & you are taken to an open field with leaves falling from the trees and a horse strolling by in the background (first picture). Then if you go on to the other pages you are still serenaded by the pretty music and the vision of falling leaves and horses, but the bottom half of the screen changes (second picture).

The only time the top image changes is when you visit their "Gallery" page. You are still hearing their pretty little song, but now the entire page changes and you have the picture options to choose from.

I hope you enjoy their site as much as I did.

Pagan & Sharp

This week I found a site for typographers in Communication Arts Design Annual 54, Sept/Oct 2013.

We so often see photography & illustrator sites that I thought this would be a nice change of pace.

Their landing page has two rotating pictures, seen in my first two images at right.

They only have the four basic links at the top so the only one that has text that is formatted would be on their "About" link. It is shown in the third picture, at left.

If you would like to check out their typefaces more closely look at their work, or their blog, please go to their page.

David Hockney

I chose to take a closer look at one of Katie's research websites. I really liked the look of this site and the way the links worked, etc. 

At right is the home page, once you have entered the site. It's very clean and easy to read with a very nice layout.

As you click on links you will notice that each one is a different color. The colors of the links are very harmonious, and I find them to also be elegant looking. 

The picture left-top shows you the "works" link, while the picture left-bottom shows the sub-link for "works/paintings/00".

The images are well represented, not overdone, and you are given preview images to click on so that you don't have to view an entire slideshow if you don't want to.

At right, is the "exhibits" tab. It is very clean, with them listed alphabetically, click-able links, all of the pertinent information.

My final image, left, is the "about" link. Again, it is very cleanly formatted. 

I just like everything about this site. Please take a closer look at it.

David Hockney

ThirdSide - Web Design

I thought I would cover a local Web Design company this week. This is ThirdSide and they are located at 701 Devonshire Drive, #C-40, Champaign, IL 61820 and their phone number is 217-693-3919.

Their site is clean and fairly straight forward with the usual Portfolio, About, Hosting and Contact tabs. I did notice that they have included some of the features that we were talking about in our Template critiques earlier today, which is one reason why I wanted to show them.

 

The World's Most Valuable Social Network - the Missing Children's Website

As this says, I found it in the Interactive Annual 19 of Communication Arts magazine. 

I liked the subject matter most of all... missing children. I can't imagine anything worse than your child being missing. So, I read the article in the magazine, and then also read the online version (sometimes they are different due to the fact that they are sometimes aimed at different audiences). 

I found the information very clear and concise. I was, overall, very pleased with what I say in the magazine and in the online article. So, I included some images here for you to examine.

They say that by signing up with this you can have any "Amber Alerts" automatically posted on your social media networks. 

Then they go on to say that it would notify those using "Foursquare", that are closest to the last known location, so that they could look around for the child & possibly see them.

Then, finally, they say that this has led to some very quickly found children. This would be great if enough people were involved. I, personally, don't use Twitter or Foursquare, so it wouldn't necessarily work too well in my instance.

If you go to the website, click on the "view case" link in order to see how everything works.
www.valuableproject.ca

TCM Summer Under The Stars - Kirk Douglas

This was for the month of August 2013, but I saw it in the Communication Arts March/April 2013 issue & just had to post about it.

Every year TCM has Summer Under The Stars and therefore are trying different ways to draw in more viewers. These are screen shots of this years web design. The entire thing is interactive and for each actor, the layout/design and typefaces are different. If you click on a picture it draws you in to another page.

 
The bio is the second page you land on. It has a synopsis of the actors life and works along with other tidbits of information about them. The text scrolls while the background remains the same.

Then on the third page you get kind of a collage of pictures from various movies that the actor starred in. You have the option to save some of these pictures off, "pin" to Pinterest, "share" to Twitter and "post" to Facebook. Sometimes you can even comment on the individual movies. It's pretty cool overall.

Then on the fourth page, the schedule appears for the times and titles of the movies that actor appears in. If you click on any of the movie titles, you will be taken to a page with a synopsis of that movie and links to articles and a video. On the bottom is a link to "shop now," which takes you to the TCM store where you can buy just about anything relating to these old movies (mugs, shirts, etc.)

Here is the link if you would like to take a look at some of the other actors' information.
TCM Summer Under The Stars 2013 

Nicholas Benner, photographer - Website

I was looking through Communication Arts July/August 2013 edition when I came across some photos that caught my attention. So I thought I would check out their websites.

They were very similar, but I think I like the one below better.

The one on left is by photographer Nicholas Benner.

Nicholas Benner, photographer

This one is for Katarina Premfors, photographer.

I like this one better because you get a bigger picture with it & I can read the links better in the white bar than on the black one above.

Katarina Premfors, photographer