Taste Crisis

[binidj]

The Fox and I are having a disagreement. Now usually when I ask him to look at one of my website designs his advice is sound and I end up taking it ... this time however I just can't. So I come to you as discerning members of the human race to see if you can help resolve this issue.

My preferred layout is here but the Fox feels that the lines are too stark (whereas I quite like the contrast).

His preferrred layout is here and whilst I'm quite proud of it as a technical achievement, I really don't like the appearance.

A couple of points to bear in mind:

1. If you use Opera or Safari you won't see much difference between the two ... this is just another instance of those browsers not handling code the way they should but at least this time the site isn't broken because if it!


2. Neither design has been shown to the client yet so it's entirely possible that they'll ask for a complete redesign.

Comments

[invisible-al.livejournal.com]

Yes in Firefox 2 the second one's 'fade out' looks rather broken...aha I've spotted what the problem is the fade only works correctly on certain sizes of monitor I'm on 1280x1024 and when I shrink my browser window down it works as intended. I get a similar effect with the background picture tiling in the first design, think if you made that image wider it should sort that.

Design wise I prefer the 1st one, the simple lines are better of the two designs, but I am a big fan of simplicity.

One question as regards content, in the final site will there be a site map and a link to streetmap.co.uk and maps.google.co.uk? Google maps has some decent satellite imagry of the area so that could be useful to link to.

[binidj.livejournal.com]

Oh bugger! Just switched my monitor to 1280x1024 and I see what you mean ... nasty! I do think you're correct though, increasing the width of the background image should resolve that particular problem, though I may also need to make some changes to the heading and navigation placement to make sure they don't go off the edge if I also stop the background tiling.

Well at least that's taught me to work in a higher screen resolution!

don't know how much my opinion counts...

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

I prefer candlstoneb. It's simple, straight forward and looks decent in opera, IE and Avant. The gradiant does nothing for me and the design of b put me in more in mind of travel brochure.

[yapman.livejournal.com]

Once I resize the window to see the grading properly, I see where you're going on the second one, but the scroll bar just doesn't work inside a faded text box. I think it has potential, but you'd have to come up with a nicer way of scrolling the text.