A look back on 2010
Careful! This post is looking a little old and could be inaccurate in many, many ways
Last year I gave a quick overview of the last decade and then a bit of a roundup of my site. This year I’m being much more lazy and I’m simply going to list my three favourite websites I built in 2010.
At a rough guess I’ve probably does some work on at least 50 different websites, some just small tweaks to existing sites, some blogs and other full redesigns. These three sites are the latter, not only designed but also developed by myself.
David Naylor
I’ve designed Dave’s site more times than I care to remember and I’ve always had issues with styling the blog to look anything more than your average WordPress template. This year I attacked the site a little differently and came up with some fantastic design ideas. This coupled with it being my first, and only, foray into HTML5 of 2010 I think it still stands out as being one of my best. All I can hope for is that this design hangs around a little longer than those that came before.
Protect Your Nest
If I was to have a definitive design style this site has to show it at its best. There’s something about stark white backgrounds and an appearance of a website stopping at 960px that I dislike. So an appearance of something outside these constraints and textures is what I find I use the most. The site is a little text heavy in parts and lacks some imagery but I love working on small websites and I think this one just came together really well.
Mel Carson
I’m waiting with baited breath for some tweaks to be sent for this website as its brand new. Again like the David Naylor site I was able to find design elements to distance it somewhat from the standard blog layout and from its predecessor. When you know the client a little better and know they have an army of friends in the Internet game willing to give an opinion it can provide a remarkable amount of pressure to build something stunning. The design I came up with isn’t fine art but it’s clean, looks good and is functional, which is just what I wanted.
This list could include a few more if it weren’t for my strong feelings of ownership. Unfortunately for me a website no longer feels to be my own work if a client enacts too much of their own ideas over the final design or subsequently makes changes to the site.
This view annoys the crap out of me but I know I’m not likely to change any time soon but I do hold on to one gem of knowledge which is that ‘my next website will be my best‘, so here’s hoping for some awesome designs in 2011.
Here’s a sneak peak of what’s I’ve got coming soon…
