This edition of Designers'Block features some of the best designs I've found on dA for the year. I'm sure there's a lot, I'm sure I missed a few since it's me alone now but there's enough to make those creative juices flow.

This edition really revolves around clean, simple and functional designs but my love for heavy graphic insisted I include a few of those as well.

I'm also introducing "Best of the Pick" where I'm going to pick one design that really just excels and I'll give a review.

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BEST OF THE PICK

my.little.green.store 1 by ~rheyzer is simply an astounding design. It may not appeal to many of you and to some you'll think it's just cute. I think it's more than that. Here's my break-down:

The positioning of the first box you see with its content is probably the best choice made in this design. It gets to the point. It tells me all I need to know and quite frankly, I need not read more unless I really want to. This increases the chances of converting visit to sales which is this case is a good cause. That's the point of a website, everything else comes second to this.

For the content, typography is the main aspect. Very often no one pays attention leading and kerning in web typography. It's left to default. The fact that this designer paid attention to it is a plus. It works because it allows you to read easily and if you're a scanner like me, even better.

For the last bit, I made an interesting observation that's testimony of how web design has or is changing. The design starts with no header, just the logo and goes right into content. As you scroll to the bottom, you're faced with heavy graphic and colours. I'm sure most of you would agree that in the past such design choices weren't made. In most cases, that would be at the top as header instead of being footer.

Does it work? Of course it does. In fact, it works perfectly in this design because of what the site is about. If you look at it conceptually you'll see the first green bar acts as the "grass" and the second brown bar acts as the "earth". The content is the "tree" growing up in the sky. You can read into it more conceptually if you like and you'll learn a lot.

Subliminally hiding a concept like that into the design is brilliant and I don't think this was stumbled upon so for the reasons stated above, this design is this edition of Designers'Block: Best of the Pick

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<sub>Designers'Block is an inspiration article primarily for designers. If you would like to contribute to the article, please contact `depthskins

All comments are of my opinion based on my experience as a designer. Feel free to openly debate and add your own comments.</sub>