Stolen Fabric

I’ve decided to go with a retro style redesign for the Stonefest website.  It’s been a pretty big design trend recently and something I’m looking to explore. These are the sites I’ve chosen to reference with the links listed below from left to right.

• http://www.coalmarch.com/
• http://adaptd.com/
• http://events.carsonified.com/
• http://www.nymoon.com/
• http://fortysevenmedia.com/

These sites all contain a number of things worth highlighting that I would like to implement in my redesign of the Stonefest website.

Colour Scheme

These sites all feature high contrast colour combinations.  Blues, greens, off-whites and browns are all popular and are carefully selected with attention to colour theory to create that retro feel.  When thinking about a colour scheme for the Stonefest website, I will have to consider the culture of the event as well as the conventions established by past sites in this style.

Navigation

Each of these examples feature excellent navigation systems which make it clear to visitors whereabouts on the site they are and all of the different areas available.  They each pass Steve Krug’s trunk test with the exception that a couple of the sites to not have a search capability.  I feel this is justified by the fact that some of the sites are quite small and would probably not benefit from including a search function.

Typography

In sites of this style, typographical choices can make or break the design.  There are a few different ways the vintage feel can be achieved with these choices.  Some sites use large font sizes to emphasise certain areas and curvy, script style fonts are often used for titles or logos.

Textures

Textures are hugely important in this style of design.  All of the sites chosen use textures heavily to create the idea that the site has seen wear and tear and that it has aged as things would in the real world.  Textures can be applied to all areas of a site, from backgrounds to logos and fonts.

RSS Feeds

A technology that is becoming increasingly popular and is extremely useful for keeping visitors informed on updates without them having to come to the site to check.  The majority of these sites provide updates via RSS and this would be something that would be very useful for the Stonefest website when announcing acts and other information.

Hand Drawn Elements

Another visual characteristic present in these sites is their use of hand drawn illustrations.  This helps to add a sense of age to the websites and they fit in well with the textures.  Some amount of illustration is, I believe, an achievable goal for my redesign of the Stonefest website.

Accessibility

The sites I have chosen for reference all comply to a certain level of accessibility standards.  These standards exist to make sure that websites are accessible to as many people as possible, including people who may have special requirements because of a disability.  Fortunately, the important content for these sites is still able to be seen when both images and style sheets have been disabled.  Also, in their standard state, the websites have a high enough contrast between the background colours and the text colours that the content could still be easily read by someone who is colourblind.  These are important factors to employ in the Stonefest website redesign because the festival attracts a wide variety of people and they should not be alienated from viewing the content if they have a disability.

I Just remembered this app called Paparazzi! (yes with the exclamation mark, who do they think they are, Yahoo!?) that lets you take full length website screenshots rather than just what you can see in the browser window.

Here’s a comparison:

Best of all it’s free.  Get it at derailer.org.

Just trying out the new Tumblr app for the iPhone/iPod touch. Liking it so far but not sure if I’d want to type out anything more than a few lines.