Digital Mash - What would you do?

So, Digital Mash is a portfolio and an online resource for web designers to gain inspiration and ideas from designer, Rob Morris.

His website consists of his own work, a journal, biography, photos, contact page and even a client login area. The structure has been thought out around then content. The text and photos sit happily next to each other, using a lot of "white space" to distance the information apart from themselves. In doing so, the site feels light and "breezey", enabling the user to "fly" through the website without having to concentrate hard on the content and to understand the layout.

I really like the use of the bold text, block of colour and thin dark line for the navigation. This design removes any "fat" from the site, keeping it streamlined, visible and airy. In otherwords, there's not big thick buttons or fancy fonts that are either too small or too excentric.

What I like about his journal is that the audience (other designers) for his site can comment and ask questions about his work, which is then responded to as you would a blog, but it's catagorised to keep things organised and relevant.

His simple organisational design in itself is something to admire. In his archive of previous posts, he's used small images to illustrate his post, but kept them simple and frequent enough to create an identity between each post that's most pleasing. However, he hasn't gone too far by adding too many images. One per post is enough to keep it eye catching, yet clean and simple.

Rob's style is to use text as a way of communication. Instead of having bright, over-powering images, he's kept them very small and minimal and used text, varying in size to keep the content structured and visual. He's kept a large word or phrase to title each page, an image to illustrate and then a simple small paragraph to explain the section you've entered.

His chatty sense of vocabulary in his design keeps the site friendly, personal and accessible. By saying "Say Hey" or "I'm the guy" makes you want to read on as the lack of formality in his choice of words makes the reader smile and feel a connection between designer and a real person.

I personally love his navigation design. I think navigation should be the main thought when it comes to web design. If the navigation looks great and works well, you should design your site around that. If the user can't understand how to use the site or the menu is too complex to understand, you've got no hope of anyone staying on your site or exploring further. Good navigation is essential, and I feel Rob has hit the nail on the head here.

Not too sure about his use of colour.. the bluey gray is a tad dull..

Using less images is another design technique I'd like to experiment with. Currently, I use a lot of colour and imagery in my designs, I'd like to try using soft gradiants and just text to see if I can create a site that connects the user with the content, because at the end of the day, text is alternative symbols and symbols can be logos right? And we all need a logo...

http://www.digitalmash.com