WIP: The Design Ledger - A web design blog

I'm concentrating on minimal range in color palette and strong typography. I plan to actually release this design as a blog.

 

The two background colors look odd. Would look better if it was one color or if you did something else with the colors. Nice and Simple Template. KIU

 

I don't like the Social Networking buttons, they don't seem to fit.

 

Could you explain why, or what you would use?

 

Try to play with them and make them match the design. Kinda simple design but looks very clean. Great work...

 

They don't really fit into the color scheme and they don't seem to really fit well into the theme. They stick out like sore thumbs.

 

Change them to the pale dark blue color... Or remake them to your liking..

 

2px border the background 2 colours, though it's not too important.

Header needs to be sharper, maybe the anti aliasing method's wrong? (set to crisp/sharp)

Underlining of the subheader (the serif font one) looks odd, possibly closer to font and a light grey.

Biggest mistake is with font/fontstyles - try stay consistent.

Consistency means a lot in font styles, and as an example, the capitalised serif font/sans serif font/normal serif font and everything doesn't work together. Whilst a combination of two fonts may be alright, it doesn't go in this case, since there're too many different font styles).

 

I was trying to do some letterpressing effects, but I knew I was doing it wrong. I fixed that, the header now stands out much stronger.

The subheader underline is just whatever the default photoshop throws in when i set the font to underlined. When I convert it all to html and css I'll be sure to fix the underline.

As for the fonts, I'm trying to reduce the number of fonts used in the design. Changes will be made as time goes on. I believe I've eliminated a font or two, leaving myself with Arial Narrow for the navigation, Adobe Garamond Pro for the subheaders and catchphrase, League Gotchic for the header and footer subheaders, and verdana as the body copy. I'm looking to see if I can work verdana in place of arial narrow.

 

But do you really need 4 fonts to achieve all of that, and remember to try to use common fonts - unless that part will me an image and not text. The common fonts help the browser and coding and less fonts make it a smoother less chaotic look.

 

For example, the navigation font can be the capitalised serif font in slightly larger size, as can be the little "the".

Serif fonts generally tend to read better, so having it as your body font could also be a decent change.