General description

Urban style is similar to grunge, but heavily focused on the urban landscape. It features elements like graffiti and comic book art styles, cityscape background images and similar ‘dirty’ textures to the grunge style. A typical colour scheme would be predominately black and grey with bright highlights. The textures and backgrounds are developed from photographs taken in the urban environment, with ‘distressed’ type effects applied to make the texture look dirty and hand-made.

Important features

• colours derived from the urban landscape
• graffiti-like effects
• comic book art style
• buildings, cityscapes or other architectural images in the background
• similar types of ‘dirty’ textures to the grunge style
• halftone/dot gradient patterns
• ‘noisy’/low-quality (in an analogue sense) photographs and images reminiscent of street photography

Read the rest of this entry »

General description

Typographic-style web design makes use of typography in interesting, creative and cutting-edge ways. This style is at the forefront of the adoption of new technologies like font embedding and CSS3. It includes elements like rich font stacks, print-style typographic techniques and attention to the subtleties of text layout.

Important features

• custom fonts
• use of cutting-edge technology for including custom fonts
• rich font stacks
• print-style typographic techniques
• use of sophisticated serif typefaces
• use of CSS3 font properties

Read the rest of this entry »

General description

Scrapbook-style web design combines elements of grunge and hand-drawn with real-life textures and light, friendly colours. It is inspired by and similar in appearance to real life scrapbooks. The style conveys an impression of friendliness and a personal touch, making it popular for websites geared towards women. It is also used for craft-related websites

Important features

• uses images of real-life scrapbooking supplies
• light, friendly colour scheme
• heavy use of paper and fabric textures
• ‘layered’ look, with several layers of textures underneath the content

Read the rest of this entry »

General description

Vintage/retro style resembles by print media from previous decades or centuries, for example 1950s advertising posters and comic books or 18^th and 19^th century magazines. Textures used include vintage wallpaper or fabric prints. The style might also incorporate real-life vintage/retro devices such as a jukebox, an old-style radio or a vintage car.

This style is often combined with elements from hand-drawn and grunge styles.

Important features

• illustrations that resemble print media from the early to mid 20^th century
• old-style typography such as script, handwriting and ‘old west’
• old items such as jukeboxes, radios, cars, signs or packaging
• vibrant, rainbow colours combined with subdued ‘dirty’ colours
• aged paper and wallpaper designs

Read the rest of this entry »

General description

Real-life web design is usually Flash-based and uses the metaphor of moving around a room or other space to deliver information. The interface resembles the real world and focuses on using real objects for their natural purpose to reduce the learning curve for new users.

Important features

• intuitive interface
• use of real-life objects for an equivalent purpose in the interface
• usually based on Flash or Javascript
• often includes ambient music or sound
• relies heavily on the user seeing and understanding the metaphor
• has some accessibility issues

Read the rest of this entry »