Good resource for all graphic designers

Eric Benson, a UI graphics professor, has been promoting the development of sustainable design standards and practices through his team's “Re-nourish” web site. "While Benson and the others still have a fair distance to go before they succeed in revolutionizing the field, their showing in a recent competition confirms that they are headed in the right direction. The group’s sustainable design research site recently placed among the top three in the Cooper Hewitt People’s Design Award competition...as well as being selected as the “Web pick” of the week by Communications Arts, one of the graphic design field’s top publications." (http://www.rdmag.com/News/Feeds/2009/12/general-sciences-graphic-designer-wants-to-make-his-field-greener/)

This site is clean, clear and user-friendly in all of it's interactive areas. It's not intended to knock us out visually (although I find it to have a real fresh feel), but rather gives you easy access to the kind of information that we really need to incorporate into our daily m.o.'s as current and future designers.

Know y'all will like this one!

Got lucky this week. First off in Print's 10/09 issue I see some design work I like, and sure enough, the responsible firm also has an outstanding web site. Sagameister is (at the very least) well known for there cd packaging for the music industry. Now that we've fiddled with flash some, you can really appreciate all the special effort that has gone into every page -- front front page mind-boggling motion to the 3-d animation of the buttons inside. And btw -- the work is great too. I've been at this a while but the link for "students" looks interesting and I'm gonna go back to read and enjoy myself...after Thanksgiving that is.

Really smooth (Flash?) action

Not only is this site well organized and designed (check out their "thumbnails along the left edge w/n Our Work), I found the movement of the animation extra smooth and refined. They do nice work as well! I found reference to this site in Print's Regional Design Annual/2009.

Simple, straightforward, yet unique

This young man is cited in Print's April/2009 "Rising Stars" issue (I've been trying to get a sense of what the new designers want to do with their own sites). He is a design illustrator rather than a designer in the commercial/graphic art sense. The way he lets his portfolio links run on as a paragraph at the top (with neon pink rollovers) is something I hadn't seen done before...as well as the fact that all of his links just go to a point further down on the page rather into another gallery. Yep, one html file, and you can essentially control your own slide show of his stuff by just hitting the "next" button. This appeals to me as the "shortest distance between two points", and also because it seems unique. The dramatic black background annoyed me at first but after looking through his work I decided it was really a good fit for his style. Good doesn't have to be complicated.

Wow. I'm thinking this must be the sharp edge.

Razorfish is another agency that's featured in the latest CA Interactive Annual. Their business is developing websites for other clients, and as they suggest in their own site, they perform like they were "born digital." There's so much going on here, so elegantly and in an understated way (even the audio cues are subtle and sophisticated), I can hardly begin to describe it all. For example, there's live video from each of their offices (lower right corner is where you choose the location) that kind of lets you spy on their activities as you wander through their site. Just crazy. Go to this site and be wowed. They are way beyond the curve.

Liking the Un-Swiss feel

Came across this site after googling "best web site designs" (thanks, Steve). The descriptive words they gave it were:Aged, Bold, Bright, Colorful, Flash, Handwriting, Illustration,Painterly, Paper, Texture. Along with all of the fun flash up top (well-done flash, that is)), I got pretty quickly what this musician Jason was like. We have so many tools to convey just about anything we want to say!

Effective use of color and format

I found Design Army referenced in the Print Regional Design Annual for this year (BTW, it's a very good collection). While the product photography seems a bit small, I really do like the minimal yet dynamic use of 2 colors (black and red). I also like the sense of "being inside" this site's space. I suppose the strong black background contributes to this. Wonder what a different color in the background would feel like?