Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese, UC Berkeley

Wow! This is pretty amazing. I'm not sure what impresses me more. the deisgn or the fact that it's powreed by wordpress! How did they do it?!!

I like the overall attempt but I think some of the site is a bit overkill.

I'm not really a fan of the navigation hovers...the green is too, well green. It matches the other greens but I feel there is too much of it in the hovers and you loose the cool text color due to the amount of contrast.

I really am not sure about the typography for the third column. Too much real estate is taken up with big letters that don't visually serve much purpose. And the search box doesn't have a visible submit button which is a pretty big usability feature that is missing.

I really like the rotating headers. They were well done and look really nice with the overall concept and feel of the site.

I love it, because this old gazeta style match exactly with the the spanish and portuguese studies, in a good and clean way.

So, take a look at the site being reviewed here and then take a look at http://www.virb.com/

No comparison. The site being reviewed aint bad but doesnt hold a candle compared to the new virb site. Sry but I'm sick of the sites being reviewed here lately.

@Darrell,

What exactly are you bringing to Stylegala and the design community at large with this comment "Sry but I'm sick of the sites being reviewed here lately."

I usually just delete comments like this because they have nothing to contribute to the discussion of the site under review and they insult fellow designers (are you claiming to be one?). Feel free to share your website with us here so that we may all take a look at what design is really all about.

Better still why not write up a review of the site you pointed out and email it to me here info@stylegala.com.

Simon

Hi Darrell

Try validating your pick:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://virb.com/

visually it's nice, but validation comes up a n0-go.

The cut starts there then, maybe some things can be fixed.

As the designer of the reviewed UC Berkeley site, I would like to thank you all for your feedback and support.

Just a couple of corrections, if I may: the site has not "30", but 450 different headers which are loaded dynamically, as the reviewer justly pointed out. Due to the randomness of the display, some appear twice within the same session. Other sections within the site, like the Semmycolon seminar have a completely different (and quite wild) illustrative style.

Re the alleged accessibility "flaw" of the search box: throughout the site we used graceful degradation so that users with Javascript off, or using keyboard navigation or browsing through a screen reader or a very old browser would NOT miss any content or basic functionality. Visitors using modern browsers with Javascript on get a dynamic AJAX search box that produces results in real time from the database. Others get a normal search box with a submit button.

This site is really quite amazing. I was not entirely bought over by my first impression of the site design, but the more I browsed the site the better I felt about it. The variable fixed layout is executed very professionally. In my opinion the only small flaw was the difficulty I found in returning to the homepage; there's a link at the foot of each page, but its position is far from obvious and should have been at the top. Nevertheless a great gallery addition!

aaaaaayyayayyyy... what can i say, the design at first does not look impressive, but the elements are great... there is something wrong though, maybe its the choice of "total white" background, did u try something different to support ur choice of multi-column layout? like in newspapers?

The header, the graphics are great, but the navigation is litterally killing it. I use a wide screen, and it spans four columns, it makes it look unorganized at the bottom, may you should limit the maximum width to be 1024?

the "top" link, you are very well aware (or maybe in your sub conscience) that i will never be clicked, can you have it in your heart to lose the link?

finally, a word of advice, there are too many black and dotted lines, if you give them a lighter shade they will stop getting in the way.

Great job, especially on the code side of it. and if you were trying to get away with "centered headlines," you nailed it!

Awesome site, on every level. I will certainly be looking at this one again in more depth, as there's a lot that can be learned from the structure and design. I'm a big fan of the header and nav combo - it's brave and ball-sy and works and I love it so there!

It's a bold look for what is in essence the website of a University department. This designer has "cojones" and for that we can only salute him. Kudos!

I like it, and don't like it at the same time. Some have already mentioned that the design doesn't really impress at first. I'm with them. I'm also not quite sold on these variable fixed width layouts yet. It makes a lot of sense if a person is only going to visit a particular website from his own personal computer, but I think a lot of people go to websites from many computers, some with different resolutions. Having a variable fixed width layout will make elements appear in different places, making them the user look harder for something that he thought he already knew where it was.

For example, my laptop has a screen resolution of 1600x1200, but sometimes my browser only takes up half the screen (800x1200). I also sometimes use my wife's computer, which is set at 1024x768, and occasionally a computer at my school, and there's no telling what the resolution there will be! So that's possibly 4 different renderings of a website, and 4 layouts to learn.

I say all this not so much to criticize, but mostly to organize some of my own thoughts on the issue. Ironically, I'm debating using a variable fixed width layout for a site that I'm working on, but that one aspect of the whole thing is what's holding me back. Thoughts?

I do like, however, that the site is full of information, yet not cluttered. The site isn't afraid of being a little different, so that's always nice. I also applaud your efforts of degrading well for older browsers as you've explained above. All of these things are what I think of when I think about the future of websites.

You made some good points Chris.

The references to learning the layout, imply it's probably a good idea to get the major nav elements to where they won't be jumping around the page if possible.

A long page if the right column drops beneath the entire layout, the use could think they lost it somehow, and not notice that it merged down into the bottoms of the page.

My window space is larger than 1024, but I commonly reset the browser to only take up 1024px, so as to be able to see my sidebar Yahoo widgets, and do any copy pasting from a sidebar.