Organized Chaos 1.0 preview
This past week, I got started working on the Organized Chaos website. I made a first impression of its design on gimp, using a few dozen grunge brushes all around. It’s another two column design overlaying a decent grunge background (which I think is the only good part of the design). I put the logo and navigation in a pitch black top section, with the links set in the Times New Yorker font. I’m not completely satisfied with the outcome. The top section and the content areas seem fairly plain and bland, but I’m sticking with this current version of the design until I can get out of my temporary loss of ideas…
Please, please leave a comment with your opinion, because I desperately need advice/encouragement/criticism/whatever if I want to do a good job on the website!
Outdated - I made a second version of this design and deleted the old one.
That’s quite nice, the feelings that the design evokes are quite suitable towards the chaos idea.
I just have a few minor ideas
The c in chaos in the upper left looks a bit too similar to the o, you might want to make it a bit more distinguished
The bottom edge of the layout feels empty. I think it needs to be different from the rest of the layout, but not so stunningly obvious.
In the upper right, you have the menu overshadowing the background. This is quite nice, but you have a tiny bit of the edge of the content box there. Sorry, it just sort of bothers me.
At the top, the font for the menu items needs to be altered a bit, I believe. Some of the letters have a very slight grunge effect on them, I believe you should strengthen the effect a bit and adding it on to other parts of the text.
You might want some sort of logo or symbol in the top left there, along with Organized Chaos.
I would also like to ask, what’s the point in the blue edge on the left? If it’s just the background, you might want to move the content box over a bit to center it more. If it’s part of the content boxes, you have two thinner segments on the left and one large segment on the right. If this was so, it doesn’t look quite right to me.
This brings me to another question. Is the design that seems to be on the content box actually on the content box? Or is it part of the background? If it isn’t I’d suggest you turn down the opacity just a bit on the big box, and up a bit on the left hand navigation (or I’m assuming it to be so). This will create a sort of contrast between the two. I’m not entirely sure how it would look, but it seems like a reasonable idea to me.
Just my basic opinions on the site, along with a few suggestions. It’s a brilliant piece of work.