MORE, Like It
So the cat’s out of the bag. CSS Beauty has picked up The Girl’s new business site, morellc.com. The response overall has been pretty positive—petty nitpicking and philosophical differences aside.
Since we’re still in the soft-launch or to use the parlance of our times, “beta” phase there are still some features to come but I want to take a moment to mention some of the things that made this a really enjoyable project to work on.
In Good Company
It’s been too long since Leslie and I had a formal font-date. In college while the other kids were out drinking themselves into a stupor and vomiting on their Studio II final projects, we would load up ATM in OS 9 (or 8.6 depending on whose room we were in) with various type collections and print the font specimens to PDF. Then over the course of the evening we would explore the nuances of each face—as well as each other’s reaction to them (you really can’t be sure about someone until you witness their reaction to a particularly grotesque oblique).
We had a chance to relive these glory days while creating the MORE logo. We explored a number of different options, various sans, over-the-top display faces and even some scripts before settling on a condensed version of an old favorite. The staccato letter forms let the logo mark do the talking, proving the trite but true adage “less is MORE.”
In a Candy Shop
When I first discovered Jon’s Agape Workplace Initiative site oh-so-many months ago I played with the navigation for a solid ten minutes (I lost another ten just now after digging up the link). That added touch of interactivity makes an already handsome design feel that much fresher. Never one to leave well enough alone I revised Travis’ original script to degrade better when JavaScript was disabled and to remove any inline event handlers making the navigation easier to maintain. If you disable JavaScript you’ll see that the menu only appears once in the source code and is actually duplicated onload, replacing the simple #top links. This keeps redundant information to a minimum and saves a little on bandwidth which works out nicely for the handheld devices that most of MORE’s existing and potential clients use.
In Due Time
A couple of people have asked why I didn’t use sIFR, instead favoring a more traditional IR. In this particular instance with only a handful of easily maintained static headers it just seemed like overkill. You will however find sIFR in the “Read MORE” and “Get Out MORE” sections once complete and seeded with content.
In Closing
I want to thank the handful of people over at CSS Beauty and Designers Talk for their criticism which helped us refine the site that much MORE.
030 Comments
That’s one nice site. Very inovative.
Beautiful site! Like Oliver said, VERY innovative, I absolutely love the simplicity and cleanliness of the site and its navigation. You are a CSS genius, props to you and all of your work and future endeavors.
Beautiful. Very simple and elegant, in both design and function.
Congratulations.
Since 1 column sites seem to suddenly be the rage — and this seems a natural extension of that train of thought — will we now see a flurry of 1 page / 1 column sites? The coming of the microsite…
:)
“Then over the course of the evening we would explore the nuances of each face”
You know you’ve found love when…
There’s something really refreshing in hearing you—of all people—say that.
First, I like it. I like anything that uses green well. I suck at using green. I like the typography too. It just looks crisp and clean. I don’t know what some folk are talking about regarding the text size. It looks fine to me.
As for complaints about the navigation? That’s just daffy. I think folk have gotten in the habit of expecting a link click to open a whole new page with associated loading time. Just cause folks are used to a certain action doesn’t mean you have to cater to it.
All in all, I think it’s elegant. I’d appreciate your updating us when you feel the site is fully done to your satisfaction.
Slightly offtopic: 1column sites are all the rage now? I had no idea my new design was hip. Wait, people don’t say “hip” anymore do they? :)
My favorite feature is the transparent faders at the tops and bottoms of each page. Subtly cool.
Great work. The design is both simple and original (particularly the scrolling and the top and bottom fadings). The result is very effective. No doubt your work will inspire many web designers ;-)
Very refreshing. Can’t wait to see the final version. This is clean and simple. Very good use of colors and typography. The logo is absolutely a hit. Just one note: In Opera the anchor jumps won’t work, nor do the scrolling.
I was going to mention this on CSS Beauty, but opted to keep my mouth shut (my fingers still?) and mind my own business. That was before I knew you had a hand in it.
I love the design, but the navigation kills me. It breaks the back button, and doesn’t justify itself — by that I mean it doesn’t seem worth it. I suppose the subtle animation(?) would seem to suggest the back button wouldn’t need to be used, since the user is only “traveling” along the same page. Whatever, I still don’t like it.
But who cares what I think. Honestly, the design does make up for it.
Wow. Good work, you two. I’m really happy to see this happening for you, Leslie. You were so excited about it when you told me, but I never imagined…(!) It was so touching to hear about your college font date. sniffle I think the nav is rad - it’s one page. All but the biggest moron will understand that plainly and not hit back. And if they do, they’ll return…for MORE.
Great design, but I still don’t understand how the smooth scrolling effect on anchor links is working. :)
After taking a peek at the JS, I had this weird, weird feeling that said “Shaun Inman”. Really nice work. The site oozes of subtleties which make it that much more enjoyable.
Great job, kids! This site is a beauty.
I like the site. It looks nice and refreshing.
The logo seems odd to me. To me, the white dots seem to be regressing. If I had come up with this idea for a logo (who knows if that would have ever happened), I think I would reverse the “growth” of the white circles, so the smallest one would be above the ‘m’ and the largest one would be above the ‘e’. In my mind—since people will read “more” from left to right”—this would give the impression of growth or ‘more’.
My two cents. And it’s Canadian money too. Take it for what it’s worth.
I gotta say, I absolutely love the site. I think the nav scheme is really nice — it’s “fun” and “cool” while at the same time making sure you understand that all the content is available to you with just a scroll (plus perfect degredation!). Your attention to detail is clear when you do a print preview — it’s so easy to re-style CSS-driven pages for print, it’s a shame so few people do it (especially for such mission-critical content).
Someone commented that it breaks the back button — and it does, in IE and Safari. In Firefox the “#whymore” is appended to the URL in the address bar, meaning the back button works just fine — do you know why?
(But anyway, I’d argue that the back button isn’t strictly required when all the content is on one page anyway, it’s just a nice-to-have.)
Anyway, nicely done.
This site is a beaut! I think you have DIN hardwired into your brain. I need to show you some new fonts… Shaun Dinman. :D
Kim, I guess it’s a matter of interpretation, but I see the logo as a green circle starting out hollow and then filling in with more green. So I think it’s quite successful.
It’s brilliant!
Are you keeping all the ‘pages’ on the same page eventually, or?
“Kim, I guess it’s a matter of interpretation, but I see the logo as a green circle starting out hollow and then filling in with more green. So I think it’s quite successful.”
As, Mr. Inman said himself, less is more. Less blank, more color. Could almost be a tagline under that logo: “Filling in the blank”. :P
Love the green. Love the fading “drop shadows”. Don’t exactly love the breaking back button though. Almost as annoying as on a flash site. Shouldn’t that be quite fixable?
“Kim, I guess it’s a matter of interpretation, but I see the logo as a green circle starting out hollow and then filling in with more green.”
Interesting. I thought it was a portal of some sort that was closing and letting in less and less light with each stage of closure. I guess in that case, it means more and more darkness. :)
I had seen the logo also from Kim’s perspective, but now can get the point the other way.
I love the navigation, actually working on something simular myself ever since I found it on squidfingers. I am one of the few who personally hates relying on the “back button” all the time to control navigation. While surfing “regular” sites I rather return to a link than reach outside the page to move around. Maybe it was the age of CD’s that got me… but I want navigation in front of me, with a quick click to forward and rewind. Too many times the back button took me farther back than I wanted to go. Until the forward button works the same way the back button does ( If I am three links forward in a site, and click the back button to go two back- why can I not click the forward button to go one ahead? That’s like having a cassette deck with only rewind on it.) I will always frown on the back button usability hype. “Guessing” what is behind me seems less intuitive than reading the detailed name of the link and clicking it.
What would be nice is if the “MORE” logo traveled along with the navigation links. All this analyzing the logo has made me have to scroll back to the top anyway, then again it was a fun way to play with the buttons longer.
cpawl, whether or not you personally like using your browser’s Back button, it is known to still be commonly used among the vast majority of web surfers. I agree that site navigation should work independent of the browser controls, but rendering the those controls useless is, as many argue here, problematic.
I heart being the last person to show up at the party.
Just hope it’s not too late for me to say that this site is, in a word, ridiculously hot. Okay, two words.
Lovely work, Shaun & Leslie. Congratulations.
Sure, can be problematic- anything “can” be problematic. Rendering my function keys on my keyboard useless can be problematic… as many Flash haters proclaim this as a major issue (the back button not the function keys) still every year more and more Flash sites exist, more and more users have the plug in installed, more and more quickly adapted to such a pre-programmed reliance. It took my mother, her very first day on the internet, about 10 seconds to realize not to use the back button in a Flash photo gallery she was viewing. It’s not really brain surgery to figure out. And again, I feel, that not relying on the back button makes more sense than relying on it.
My point is, there is room for alternatives in this big ol’ interweb- and the MORE navigation is a welcomed addition.
Wonderful job Shaun. The simplicity and clean edge of the design is awesome. MORE is probably one of the best designs I’ve seen in a while.
Congratulation Shaun, your redesign it’s remarkable. That navigation bar it’s amazing, great work!
i love your style!!! very great!!!
greatings from germany, side
I love it too ;) Any related?
great job, Greetings from website designers sydney