Simple, minimalist.  Takes advantage of EE’s easy adaptability.  Still some cleanup to do and some holes to be filled, but definitely beta-launchable.  This is my third EE site—got a big one (with a custom e-commerce platform) launching next month.

hillmancurtis.com

This is a pretty big deal producing a site for Hillman Curtis! Are you a designer there or were you contracted for the job?

I think the only thing I would change are the secondary navigation items. I think you should set your links to display: block; and set the width, so on :hover I don’t always have to go over the words to be able to click in, and your :hover effect (black color bg) would look nicer if it was the same width on all items in the nav.

Other than that, this is a high profile client, the design isn’t the most ground breaking, but content is king, the work shines on its own here, and the flow of the information is great.

Kudos!

lunchboxcollective - 23 June 2008 03:53 PM

This is a pretty big deal producing a site for Hillman Curtis! Are you a designer there or were you contracted for the job?

I was Hillman’s lead developer for the last little while.  I sat a couple chairs away from him, and every now and then he’d take off his headphones and say something along the lines of “Hey Steve, what would it look like if we hooberflopped the whatchyamajonger?”  So I’d spend a couple minutes coding that monkey up, at which point Hillman would squint at it and say, “Nnnnnnnnnah.  Nah, let’s put it back.”  It was an incredible environment, very warm and wholly collaborative.  Swiss Miss sat across from us, and the eMusic folks would rent a desk every now and then.

Anyway, we originally had the left nav highlights at a fixed width as you suggest, but Hillman liked it better this way—looking as though the text had been mouse-selected.  We went through ...oh, I’d say two dozen or so iterations of the design before settling on this one.  And it’s still evolving.

Thanks for the compliments!

steve.k

I like the new site and design, good collaboration! The little bits of js, hide/view, on the subscribe and embed links make a big difference. Hillman’s videos were always compressed really well, but the new flash player/streamer is much better. The only thing that the old site had that I miss with the new one is Hillman’s INSPIRATION threads, that content was gold.