Inspiration From the Reboot
So as many of you know yesterday was the CSS Reboot and it was pretty exciting. Early in the day the site had some server issues but other then that it went pretty smoothly from what I can tell. I had planned on rebooting this site but I didn’t give myself enough time to finish it. A number of the designs were pure inspiration. I knew there was gonna be some great redesigns but some of them just blew me away and deserve more recognition. Here are some of my favorite, less recognized, designs from the reboot in no particular order.
Total Spore
Have you ever heard of the upcoming game called Spore? Well I hadn’t until I saw this site and now I can’t wait to play it. The site is designed and maintained by Kyle Neath and it uses a green and grey color theme similar to the Forty Media redesign. Everything I know about the game I learned from Kyle’s site. Total Spore is such a joy to look at it just makes you want to stay and have a look around.
Keep up the good work Kyle! I think I just became your biggest fan.
Pronet Advertising
It’s another green design but it’s also one of the cleanest and most professional sites I’ve ever seen. The site is so simple yet so beautiful. Neil Patel designed this one and made excellent use of colors, gradients, and rounded corners to create a very professional looking site for his blog. Pronet is just an all around well done and well thought out website.
Forty Media
Maybe I’m a little biased with this one since I get to meet James (the owner of Forty Media) a few times a month but the new design is absolutely amazing! I was a fan of his old design but the new design is simply incredible. There’s not a whole lot more I can say other then I love this design. Not only is the design great but the content is great too. They’ve added a blog to the Forty Media site but the thing I found the most interesting was under the about section. Why? They list their competitors right on their site. Maybe I’m just blind but I don’t think I’ve ever seen another web design company list their competitors.
James and the Forty Media Gang did an excellent job and I look forward to reading the new blog.
Others Worth Mentioning
If I had the time and the patience I’d do a paragraph about all of these.
Obu Web (Another awesome Refresh Phoenix dude)
Rob Goodlatte (see not all my favorites are green)
And of course…
Random Shapes (I prefer to call this a shameless plug, not egotistical)
[...] Terry Ng’s CSS Reboots That Earned a Bookmark, TXP Magazine’s list of Texpattern Reboots, obü web’s Rebooters Ball and Matt Bob Jones’s Inspiration From the Reboot. [...]
Posted by Everybody is (still) Reboot wrap-upping – WebJillion on May 3, 2006.
Matt,
Just FYI, the Pronet set was (I believed) designed by wonderchild Joseph Wain, with whom I played some Photoshop tennis while designing the Forty Media site (the tabs and the tweaked final logo, for example, were mostly his ideas.)
I’m not at all surprised that he showed up in your list twice. He’s a phenomenal designer, and we’ve been fortunate enough to work with him on a number of projects in the past.
Posted by James Archer on May 6, 2006.