LA Designs - Site Design

If I'm honest I'm not sure those 'illustrations' would fit in with the style of your site. It's not the idea, loads of sites do the animated sliders with 'drop in text' etc but I think the choice of colours you've used doesn't flow with the rest of the site.
I'd also argue that the illustration you've shown isn't really keeping with the 'minimal' feel so if this is the direction your 'illustrations' were going then I'd be careful they don't contrast too heavily with the rest of the site.
 
Don't dismiss the idea completely just yet lol
My main issue was colour based so it might be worth playing with some alternative colours or even just their saturation. Here's a quick play around with the saturation of the images and in my opinion doesn't stand out quite so much. Obviously it's not as minimalist as the rest but you did say this was a sample idea not a final one so you might be able to fix that issue :)

http://imageresolutions.co.uk/sean1.png
 

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thats the sort of idea I'm on about... now you've just to get the rest of the ideas sorted. You might just need something top right though to balance that image out, it's a bit empty compared with the other bits
 
Just need to make sure that the site works with anything that needs to go in the slider.
 
now I've seen them....
I was like you know what would be really clever.. make the background/sky (and maybe text colours) change according to the time of day. I know it's possible with some scripting etc.
 
In the future I'd love to have a site which does that all with code but I'm not competent enough with it to do all of that. I just want to get my site up now, that's all I care about! I'll just stick with a slider for now :p What do you think of the illustrations, liking them?
 
I like the more muted one more but I can understand the reason for a brighter sky in the second one.
oh take a quick read of this, i'm sure you could work something out :p
 
It's a good idea, but doesn't really work with what I'm trying to do. My plan is to convey a sense of progression over a period of time. It'll probably make more sense when I show you the third slide. which is going to be set at dusk/night :)
 
Final slide, it's about 85% complete. Got some more work to do on the clouds and sky, then I might just go over the town one more time with another layer of small details.
http://puu.sh/33KsJ.png
 
Have had a look through this thread and I like the way your site is going, but I think the illustrations are the wrong move.
A slider at the top of your page should be used to showcase what you do and there is nothing better than getting some of your work examples in there and throw in some testimonials. Remember its the first thing the person will see when they hit the page and I am not sure a moonlit shot of a town is really going to help them to pick you to design your website, but chuck in some cracking visuals of some of the recent work you have done and that might get them interested.
Also these look time consuming to do and when you are busy with clients work you might not have time to update them - this giving your site quite a static presence.
Years of working with content delivery I have always felt if you make it as simple as possible to update content then it benefits your site. So if I add a slider to a clients website I would make sure they have the ability to add an image, video etc, but also throw in the text so that it has some communication purpose to the visitor. Do on your site what you would do for a client.
 
Wow, huge steps forward from the first draft to this last one! Really clean (and I would say different) site you have there. Looking forward to testing it out!
 
@Johnstone Thanks for the feedback! In regards to the slider I figured that due to the content and layout of the landing page it doesn't really need two areas to display work, that's what the previous work section is for. It would feel counter intuitive to have a minimalist design that utilises space so poorly, don't you think? I thought it would be better to use it in a more unique way and try to pique peoples interest in my site right from the start. Certainly putting previous work examples up there is a good way to do that, but I just felt that a different approach was needed with this layout.

The slides are time consuming, but I enjoy doing it and as I do more slides the process is becoming much quicker. I may have an issue with site appearing static, so I will attempt to rectify that by adding in some areas of social activity further down the page. I don't feel that the sliders would need to be changed on a regular basis as it's fulfilling a different role than usual, which is to communicate a specific message to potential clients, which isn't going to change any time soon.

Part of me thinks you also haven't quite understood how it's meant to work? Where you say that a shot of a moonlight town won't help me to attract clients for web design, well as you would have seen from the previous comments in this thread, there are actually 3 separate slides and its primary purpose is to convey a message, not to give a preview of the work I do, they can scroll their mouse wheel a minute amount for that:

Slide 1: http://puu.sh/38Wt1.png
Slide 2: http://puu.sh/38VRJ.png
Slide 3: http://puu.sh/38VSh.png

Also, the site isn't specifically aimed at just website design, so I don't think it's the end of the world if it doesn't scream "I do website design". I believe that every site should be totally unique, especially for businesses, so I'm not sure that doing what I'd do for a client is really going to work in this situation.
Thanks for your feedback, it's really appreciated :)
@Alex (Gilmore) Thanks mate, glad to see you back here again! Hopefully you stick around ;) I look forward to having it built so I can actually finish it but I've just started a new project so might not have too much time for it all. Hopefully I can just make some time for it :)
 
Sean Lee-Amies said:
@Johnstone Thanks for the feedback! In regards to the slider I figured that due to the content and layout of the landing page it doesn't really need two areas to display work, that's what the previous work section is for. It would feel counter intuitive to have a minimalist design that utilises space so poorly, don't you think? I thought it would be better to use it in a more unique way and try to pique peoples interest in my site right from the start. Certainly putting previous work examples up there is a good way to do that, but I just felt that a different approach was needed with this layout.

The slides are time consuming, but I enjoy doing it and as I do more slides the process is becoming much quicker. I may have an issue with site appearing static, so I will attempt to rectify that by adding in some areas of social activity further down the page. I don't feel that the sliders would need to be changed on a regular basis as it's fulfilling a different role than usual, which is to communicate a specific message to potential clients, which isn't going to change any time soon.

Part of me thinks you also haven't quite understood how it's meant to work? Where you say that a shot of a moonlight town won't help me to attract clients for web design, well as you would have seen from the previous comments in this thread, there are actually 3 separate slides and its primary purpose is to convey a message, not to give a preview of the work I do, they can scroll their mouse wheel a minute amount for that:

Slide 1: http://puu.sh/38Wt1.png
Slide 2: http://puu.sh/38VRJ.png
Slide 3: http://puu.sh/38VSh.png

Also, the site isn't specifically aimed at just website design, so I don't think it's the end of the world if it doesn't scream "I do website design". I believe that every site should be totally unique, especially for businesses, so I'm not sure that doing what I'd do for a client is really going to work in this situation.
Thanks for your feedback, it's really appreciated :)
@Alex (Gilmore) Thanks mate, glad to see you back here again! Hopefully you stick around ;) I look forward to having it built so I can actually finish it but I've just started a new project so might not have too much time for it all. Hopefully I can just make some time for it :)
Click to expand...
Love it Sean!
One thing I don't get though, but probably missing the point!
If the sliders show up throughout the day etc. Why would a field and farm grow during the day and back to nothing the next morning or have you changed the daytime/nighttime concept of showing each slider at specific times?
 
Ben. said:
Love it Sean!
One thing I don't get though, but probably missing the point!
If the sliders show up throughout the day etc. Why would a field and farm grow during the day and back to nothing the next morning or have you changed the daytime/nighttime concept of showing each slider at specific times?
Click to expand...
look at the pictures more closely, not just the fields :)
 
Hey Ben. Thanks, I appreciate the compliment! The basic concept was a city growing over a period of time, as indicated by the growth of the hamlet to a city throughout the three slides. The times of day were only really added so that I could have a bit more fun with the designs and make them look quite visually different, about half way through I thought that there might be the possibility of people thinking that the time difference between each slide were only a few hours, so I went back and added more emphasis on the growth of the city in each slide. The farms weren't really intended to show time progress as I couldn't easily indicate an approximate month of the year, so it wouldn't really matter what I did with the crops, I just wanted to add a bit of variation :)
 
Update time!
Home Page: http://www.ladesigns.co.uk/fileserver/home-page.jpg
About: http://www.ladesigns.co.uk/fileserver/about.jpg
Work: http://www.ladesigns.co.uk/fileserver/work.jpg
Work-Sub Page: http://www.ladesigns.co.uk/fileserver/work-sub.jpg
Pricing: http://www.ladesigns.co.uk/fileserver/pricing.jpg
Contact: http://www.ladesigns.co.uk/fileserver/contact.jpg
The designs are mainly for layout purposes, so some of the content, i.e. the pricing page, isn't finished yet. It will also be a responsive design, so issues such as the side nav being a bit close to the content shouldn't be a problem in the final build.
 
I kinda missed this thread and skimmed trough it but personally I think the site looks AWESOME!
I love the idea of the little village and the idea of building on it and I think the illo's are really well executed.
Also like the type on the hills.
Top banana!
:clap:
 
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