Amazingly designed sites – from cleaner to crowded

I want to showcase 7 sites that I really like. I like them because they are 1) clean, even those crowded with options are easy to navigate, 2) they are colorful, they dare to use colors and they use them good and for good, 3) they have a lot of small details carefully crafted, showing that the designer spent a lot of time taking care of this and that instead of throwing it quickly on the table.

Du Bout des Yeux

http://www.du-bout-des-yeux.com/

The first one is the cleaner. This portfolio site by Sandrine Abraham goes straight to the point. I love the colors and the small details like the dotted lines and the sticky note.

Big Cartel

http://bigcartel.com/

Adding a bit of creme and some textures we have Big Cartel. Again, very clean and organized, a Sign Up Free highlighted in green shows you the way to heaven and listening to the advice of information redundancy, there’s another big block calling us to sign up for free. Being a powerful store system, it is amazingly simple and intuitive.

Miley Cyrus

http://www.mileycyrus.com/

Miley Cyrus site is a fine example of a star site and a Flash site. It doesn’t want to be something out of this world with 3d boxes flying everywhere and blinking text here and there. It remains true to the music of Miley and that’s cool. Although it features some grunge stuff, the design doesn’t get messy: is really clean and well structured.

Mouse to Minx

http://www.mousetominx.co.uk/

This is a engaging site from the minute you enter. The design is as eclectic as the cloth itself and that’s good. The light background makes really easy to focus on the important elements on the page.

Free People

http://www.freepeople.com/

This may be the best fashion site. I love everything about it, from colors, details, style, and the cloth they sell is just awesome. Even the girls are not only pretty, but they look like a real girl that you could find on your city, so girls looking for some clothes can actually relate to them. When you select a girl from Trends or Apparel, you can choose to see the outfit in other colors, and there are usually two different models, a blond and a brunette for example, and that’s something huge for girls, to see how the outfit looks with their own hair color.

The catalog section is really awesome and it’s reason I’m featuring two screenshots from this site:

Ok, you say “plain flipbook style?” not at all. Look closely and you will see a magenta stroke outlining the garment. You can roll your mouse over the garments the girl has and it will show you the name of it, and if you click it, it will take you to the garment specific page. This is just awesome.

Five Cent Stand

http://www.fivecentstand.com/

We’re getting dirtier and dirtier, but this site rocks you from the moment you enter (the loading bar). I don’t have much to say here, it’s great and the music the site features is really nice. Enter for a little while and listen to it.

Why so serious

http://www.whysoserious.com/

Ok, last site. Very dirty. And clean. Clean because the idea is to play with it and you can do it easily.

Put a smile on your face and visit these sites, see you next time.