Fresh Design Template

[Bonekhan]

What do you guys think? Yes... I went a BIT overboard, but I want an honest opinion.

Please and thank you.

[SEÑOR]

6/10 its so messy and just its hard to see, and it hiurts my eyes, sorry m8, count this as constructibve ctirisim

so a recap:
To much going on(-2)
to many colors(-1.5)
nav font way to big(-0.5)

[monky91]

Okay, simple is good. This is nice, but there is some mismatch for the colours. 6/10 for you.

[Bonekhan]

Alright, critisism appreciated!

I made this entire thing in a little over 2 hours. The thing was, I wanted to kinda try all sorts of different techniques on the template. The paint in the background, the vectors in the foreground, and alot of other stuff are techniques I have never tried before.

I realize it looks extremely busy... I will probably refine this into several templates (ie.; one without the paint, some different color schemes).

Again, thanks for the comments :D

[Tastypoo]

Looks pretty cool, 8/10

[Woolie]

Wow, thats a lot of colours *gasp*. Hokay then a few things you can improve on...

The large use of colours, just take one colour and go for different shades of it. Never mix your colours too much unless you really know what your doing. It can make it look really horrid. On the other hand you could do it perfectly and get it to look like Pixel2Life. It's safest to just stick to shades of colour.

Along with quite a few people, you have a tendancy to make things BIG. The text is huge, the rounded corners are huge, the content boxes are huge. Get my point? Try and make things smaller, or more to the point, the borders and space inbetween smaller. This is a hard concept to explain, ermm yea. I would never go above 10px radius for the rounded corners (perhaps 15 if you have to).

Another thing, the navigation. I would highly recommend not using images for navigation. It will help you in the long run, and will cut down on the amount of images used in your site.

And remove those darn "sample" watermarks. They just completly **** up the look of the layout. I shouldn't think anyone will go and "rip your layout". Not because of what it is, just because they haven't got the time nor the will power.

Apart from that, I love the little black circly bits on the footer

[Zenax]

It looks good, however again as people have mentioned, stick to one colour scheme.

7/10

[Bonekhan]

Wow, thats a lot of colours *gasp*. Hokay then a few things you can improve on...

The large use of colours, just take one colour and go for different shades of it. Never mix your colours too much unless you really know what your doing. It can make it look really horrid. On the other hand you could do it perfectly and get it to look like Pixel2Life. It's safest to just stick to shades of colour.

Along with quite a few people, you have a tendancy to make things BIG. The text is huge, the rounded corners are huge, the content boxes are huge. Get my point? Try and make things smaller, or more to the point, the borders and space inbetween smaller. This is a hard concept to explain, ermm yea. I would never go above 10px radius for the rounded corners (perhaps 15 if you have to).

Another thing, the navigation. I would highly recommend not using images for navigation. It will help you in the long run, and will cut down on the amount of images used in your site.

And remove those darn "sample" watermarks. They just completly **** up the look of the layout. I shouldn't think anyone will go and "rip your layout". Not because of what it is, just because they haven't got the time nor the will power.

Apart from that, I love the little black circly bits on the footer

Yes, I was afraid this was too big. The thing is, since the sheer size of my monitor, I do have a tendancy to make things that, while they look good on a high resolution monitor screen, they probably look horrible on a smaller one.

The navigation was simply a place holder (to show how the text navigation will work).

Regarding the watermarks, I've only recently started doing that. A few months ago a friend informed of a website that had, among other things, some ripped templates of mine. And, ripping a template is pretty easy without a watermark, because all you need to do is open Photoshop, slice, and save for web. I hate them just as much as you do.

Here is a more refined version, as well as another template in progress (maybe give me some feedback about that as well!)

Refined Version of Fresh Design
Preview of new template

[Woolie]

Love the second one. If you learn how to make killer CSS websites, the skill of doing those retro things in Photoshop will come in handy.

Just keep practicing, we all make websites like that to start with, then look back and realise how awful they were. I mean, take my first website I made. Same symptoms, large boxes, awful colours, large fonts, image navigations. Not to mention a scrolling right side bar!

Click here to see the awfulness!

[Bonekhan]

Love the second one. If you learn how to make killer CSS websites, the skill of doing those retro things in Photoshop will come in handy.

Just keep practicing, we all make websites like that to start with, then look back and realise how awful they were. I mean, take my first website I made. Same symptoms, large boxes, awful colours, large fonts, image navigations. Not to mention a scrolling right side bar!

Click here to see the awfulness!

Thanks. I'm learning CSS at the moment