Stuart Row Landscapes

Gallery / Stuart Row Landscapes« previous | next »

Stuart Row Landscapes

Current rating: 5.5 (378 votes)

Rate this site:

Added: 18 March 2005
Designer: Brian Spaid
Submitter: Brian Spaid

Review:

This site will probably chug on modems due to its hi-fi design, but this is a great example of attention to detail in what at first glance might appear to be a simple site. Take note, for example, of the subtle transparency on the main content area.

The off-angle images, the vivid photography, and the attention to detail make this a great site to study for fresh technique ideas.

There are some down sides, though. The extensive use of graphics will prevent the site from being peppy for some users; some of the text images appear fuzzy due to compression; there are a few unnecessary layout tables; and they seem to have missed validation by a single character.

All things considered, though, this is a fine new work by Media Pulse, and I hope to see more of this from them in the future.

Reviewed by James Archer

There are 16 guest comments so far.

at 20:55 on 18 March 2005, Toolpi wrote:

Great site; The colors will make night to day. Good colors was choosen and site is good reading/navigations. The designer has lovely played with details and that i'am love, too.

Toolpi

at 21:34 on 18 March 2005, Jon Jakoblich wrote:

I'd like to know how they got the footer2.png transparency to work in IE6. Nothing obvious glares at me from studying the stylesheets and source code.

It's a marvelous design.

at 21:47 on 18 March 2005, Anthony wrote:

See for the fix that it looks to me like they implemented.

at 22:06 on 18 March 2005, Kyle wrote:

Pretty glaring to me :)

<!--[if gte ie 5.5000]>

<![endif]-->

As for the site, I cannot stand that terrible compression on the images. Totally ruins the site for me.

at 22:08 on 18 March 2005, Kyle wrote:

Whops, comment form ate my code. Look at the source to my comment above.

at 00:16 on 19 March 2005, Jon Jakoblich wrote:

>>Pretty glaring to me :)

Doh, I totally ignored the commented section. Thatnks for pointing out my oversight.

at 04:27 on 19 March 2005, Colin Cameron wrote:

This is an extremely well executed site. The design is perfect and a nice change. But the image quality definetly ruins the overall look and feel.

at 06:29 on 19 March 2005, John wrote:

Well, considering the size of the background images and the additional fact that they are fixed, the compression is a necessary evil to keep the download even slightly manageable.

Large background images are a tough challenge to deal with, especially when they can't tile.

at 23:22 on 19 March 2005, Kyle wrote:

It's not a neccecary evil. The stripe background could easily be a 100% quality gif that is tiled. Then have the logo a high JPG/GIF, and the flowers a low quality JPG - cutting down download time

Looks a lot like they were just lazy with the site... a little bit extra work would have made the site appear 10x better. I suppose after further inspection, I don't believe this site should even be featured here. A site like that would never have left my shop, or any shop with a proper QA sy

at 08:26 on 20 March 2005, r0ss wrote:

Brian definitely has a fresh and unique style. Very soft, clean and easy design to look at. Nice that he doesnt follow the 'boxy' look that so many follow. Good job man!

at 10:39 on 22 March 2005, Phil Yarrow wrote:

Brian, what a beautiful design. If the landscaping sector was packed with professionally designed sites, you would still reach the pinnacle for UI, original creativity, clean colours and quality typography.

I would personally add an invisible home page link to the top right logo, and continue with business card link. Print media needs some small tweaks, but apart from that, well done.

at 21:19 on 22 March 2005, Brian Spaid wrote:

Thank you all for your comments. As you can imagine this design posed a few logistical problems when I got to the build phase. The cross-platform PNG transparency took a little while, but the key there is 1px vertical repeating images fixed with the conditional-commented IE-only stylesheet with DirectX filtering (see /css/ie.css). ...more in next post...

at 21:19 on 22 March 2005, Brian Spaid wrote:

at 21:21 on 22 March 2005, Brian Spaid wrote:

...The home link of the top-left logo missing still bugs me, but I haven't found a good fix to the IE fixed positioning bug. HELP! Somebody? That would fix the image quality problem some of you are complaining about because then I would be able to separate the logo from the background graphic which is what I wanted to do in the first place. Anyone have any ideas?

at 21:53 on 06 April 2005, Max Khokhlov wrote:

Great site! I love it! It's not that often that you can see a really fresh web solution nowadays! Definitely went as a bookmark to my “Good design” category.

at 02:37 on 22 September 2005, roderick wrote:

<p>compressing your images</p>

Gallery by month:

Gallery by rating:

Gallery All Stars:

Comments / recent

About satsu design: Its perfect desing. Congratulations...... [more]

About satsu design: Just because the sketched out look of Satsu uses s... [more]

About satsu design: Fabulous color schemes in this design, very well d... [more]

About satsu design: this is well really, but there are somethings. For... [more]

About satsu design: Did someone say "jump the shark", cause that would... [more]

Search

Features

Stylegala BookStore: The Stylegala BookStore has a massive archive of great books for you as a professional..
Bullet madness: Bullet madness is a list of 200 bullets, arrows and icons uploaded by our users.
CSS Reference: An alphabetical list over the most common CSS1 and CSS2 syntax and properties.