Even though I have never jumped on board and designed my own pair, the design your own shoe fad has been around for a while. I think I originally remember Converse doing it with the Chuck Taylor a while back. I have been a fan of it for sure, especially since it allows you to create a shoe around your personality or style.

I came across the Nike Air Troupe Design Battle while browsing the FWA site. It is definitely a fun site to play around with. A lot of smooth scrolling and colorful shoes flying around, a nice hip hop beat playing in the background, attractive break dancers, grabs the attention of any MTV – Americas Best Dance Crew fan (fist pumps for the JabbaWockeeZ and Kaba Modern). Basically the site allows you to design a shoe and then have it judged by other viewers of the site. The judging process consist of ten 3-second rounds where 2 shoes are presented and you choose which one you like the best. Once you have chosen a shoe another shoe is shown and you decide if you like the one you just chose or if you like the new one. It’s pretty fun because it is fast paced and the shoes bump to the music.

The overall design is clean and simple with a slight touch of grunge in some instances. The colors are reminiscent or the 80’s with bright yellows, teals, pinks, etc. popping off the black background. All the shoes are very large and colorful as well which will definitely draw the shoe lover out of everyone.

Lets face it, everyone is all about straightforward content these days. We like it short and sweet and right to the point. Well Nike has not strayed far from the path with this site. Everything is short and simple and can keep the attention of a two year old for sure, even when it comes to the break dance bios.

Overall, I think it is a great micro site to promote the Nike Air Troupes. It also promotes individuality which I am a huge advocate of. Thanks for stopping by, I am off to play around with the site some more and maybe design my own pair!

When I graduated in 2004 I was hired at an Advertising Agency right outside of Charlotte NC. At this point in time it seemed as though flash was on the rise and it was all over the place. It was very intriguing to me and I quickly adapted it as a useful medium. I started off doing full flash sites such as Splash Zone USA and some of my older personal portfolio sites. It was fun at the time but I seemed to migrate back to static sites with dynamic elements. Now, I hardly use flash unless its for special one off projects but I still love to browse full flash sites because they seem to engage the viewer more since there is a higher level of interactivity.

Some of my favorite flash sites to look at are Photography sites. Most of them seem to be very simple and dedicate 98% of the site to viewing the image. I recently came across a website for a photographer, Anders Bergh. Not only is his site very clean and simple but it showcases his unbelievable talent.

The site displays all the images in rows and columns and makes use of the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one by allowing you to scroll up and down with ease. When you click on a photo it zooms in, allowing you to either view the image in extremely clear detail or view the image as a whole. I personally think this feature is useful on landscape photos not “Mug Shots”, no one wants to zoom in on someones nose hairs, do they? If you are zoomed in you can navigate left or right by clicking on either side of the photo and you can zoom back out by clicking on a menu that appears when you hover over the center. The personal info is tucked away neatly at the top and only appears if your cursor gets about half and inch away from leaving the browser window.

Overall I think APT Copenhagen did a great job on displaying this photographers work, you almost forget that it is a website because it is so different than you basic static site.  What do you guys think?

1. Lorem Ipsum

I think this is a site that most designers are familiar with. It allows dummy content to take place of actual content before it can be provided. I would say at least 95% of my clients come to me without any type of content but they want to get started right away. Well that’s when I roll on over to the Lorem Ipsum site and snatch a couple paragraphs, lists, etc and drop it in to the design. Its also beneficial because the client doesn’t get to focus on the content. They can solely focus on the the design.

2. Colour Lovers

Color palettes are extremely important. They can really make or break a site design. If you are mixing the wrong colors together it can look real cheesy real quick. I have rarely grabbed an exact color palette from this site but I do you use it to sometimes find a base color to start with. Most of the times colors can be grabbed from photos or base color can be chosen from a clients logo. I would recommend this site for some real good inspiration.

3. The FWA

I would think most designers have at least one site that they use to see what other people are designing. Whether it be a blog, a gallery or maybe a portfolio site of someone you really admire. I have been using FWA for a long time and have gotten a lot of great ideas from the sites that they feature. They really do a good job of posting sites that are cutting edge rather than just posting everything they find. If you have never been there you should definitely check it out.

4. psd Tuts

One thing that has really helped me boost my skills as a designer are Tutorial sites. Now, there are tons of these sites out there but one that I have been visiting lately is psd Tuts. They really have a great community over there and commit themselves to posting some solid content. Designers definitely have to continue to push themselves if they want to get better or else you just kinda stay umm… stagnate. I have met so many people that tend to just settle for the same old thing and their work definitely shows it. Whether you do that through a tutorial site or you do it through experimentation, that’s up to you. psd Tuts is a good place to start if you are looking.

5. Google

Everyone uses Google but not everyone uses all of the applications that Google has created. One component that’s is a great asset to any website is the Google Analytics application. You can see basically any type of stat for your website, keywords used to find your site, what browser was used to view your site, geographical locations of your visitors and the list goes on and on. But one thing that you can do with this information is use it to modify your site accordingly. You can better optimize your site for search engines, you can modify design elements that may cause visitors to leave once visiting and much more. If you don’t use it currently on your site you should definitely check it out.

What are some of your most used sites?

Lately I have been trying to find some really inspiring commerce sites. Sites that are really unique in displaying products but keep it simple enough so that the user knows what is going on. I stumbled upon The Affair while browsing through The FWA site and figured I would share it with you all.

Its a really simple layout, mainly black with the focus on the t-shirts. The shirts are displayed on an actual person so you can see how the shirt actually fits. I think that is one major issue with buying shirts online is knowing exactly how they are going to fit your body. If you are fimilar with the brand then its a no brainer but for someone new I think this small detail could close a couple deals. Once you click on one of the characters you are prompted with a much larger display of the shirt with some descriptive details as well as some other views of the shirt.

So far the user experience is pretty basic. The navigation arrows and icons are very easy to find and use. There isnt really anything on the page that is not useful to the consumer. Once you have chosen a shirt and added it to your cart you can then check out via their straight forward shopping cart. The only downfall is that the user is then taken to a paypal page to finish the transaction. I think it would have been a bit better to keep the transaction within the site but you know sometimes budgets may not permit.

Overall I think this is a pretty sweet and simple commerce site and have definitely pulled some ideas from this site to hopefully tie into my upcomming project.

What are your favorite commerce sites? Why?