5000 Happy Birthday Presents
Keeping within the Birthday Bash week, we have teamed up with AllBusinessCards.com to give 5 lucky winners 1000 business cards each.
The redesign has been live for one day now… we have fixed the majority of the bugs and small issues. So we are now looking for you to add some initial feedback on the design. I know I ask this a lot but I want to have a site that is driven by user feedback.
How to Win
All you have to do is submit a comment about what you like or dislike about the redesign. We will then pick 5 winners at random. The contest will be open till tomorrow at 5pm EST. We will announce the winners Thursday Feb 5 at 9am EST.
The Prize
1000 business cards courtesty of AllBusinessCards.com.
Join the discussion
yeah the new redesign is absolutely great!
i love the header and the footer and everything else in between!!!
great job guys!!
I like the patterns in the background, and the colors. They are great. It feels like you are reading a Book.
Well, nothing left to say, just Good Upgrade!
Have so say that the upgrade to the site is much needed! It now looks very complete and runs alot smoother! Navigation is key to all sites and its clear that this has been taken into consideration when designing a site that provides so much information!
Great job!
Great upgrade guys! There aren’t many things that I do not like, overall I thing it’s a solid design. The two things that bother me just a bit is the black line at the top (don’t like the rigidness) and the huge bar at the bottom (could be a 25% smaller). Other than that, wonderful job!
I really like it. The design makes the page pop and look very multi dementional. It’s simple, appealing and very fresh.
Great work.
I like the little details, like the shadows under the post-it and the brushed edges. Even though it easily could it doesn’t feel “handmade” and old fashioned. The light blue gives it a modern touch.
Clean Colors, I like the new theme
And the Test tubes fits perfectly with the “Design inspiration Lab”
Wow.. what great feedback we are getting, I love it….
All of this feedback will be taken into consideration and within the next few weeks, we will tweak this site to make sure all the proper changes have been made.
Keep them coming, digg, stumble, float, tweet to get the word around.
I’ve been thinking more about the web. And being also a web designer and having had the experience of handling a couple of blog I know that changing a design is a lot of work… something that can only be done once in a while.
So I would recommend you for the next time or if you have the opportunity to try it now:
- Create what they call a wireframe, without colors, without textures, just weights. Trying to focus on the composition. On the needs in each one of the sections. If one thing Josef Muller Brockman has taught me well this year is that “it’s all about the spacing”.
- Once you have all the spacing, weights, hierarchies set and working is time to create a color scheme. Which colors will be seen in the website? Right now you have a solid blue, a solid light blue, solid dark blue, a gradient between these blues, even a different blue for the logo. You’re using black as a title and a lighter black on the sidebar. Pink to push things up. A greenish color for the footer mixed with blues, whites, and pinks. I’d suggest to clarify a color scheme thinking on which is the purpose for each one of them.
- Then… when you have all this done, textures and other things just pop out and fit extremely perfect.
I’d point out the work done at Viget Labs and their 4 pack websites [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4]
Apart from that I realy enjoy a website that focuses on the content without a lot of messy stuff going around, and that is you new redesign.
Nothing more… I hope you can enjoy my humble opinions.
BTW: what about a comment preview plugin haha.
I like the style and feel of this redesign and I think it’s easy enough to navigate and find everything. But it is a bit cluttered… overall is nice though!!!
I love the notepad style! Very refreshing.
I don’t like the hover over the navigation; it can be difficult to see the link sometimes.
Well done!
The new site if very clean looking and well organized. It’s quite a pleasure to navigate through it, well done!
I actually usually only view the site through the RSS feed in Google Reader, but I like the new design.
The test tube header gives the site a really fun feel to it.
I Really like the new design, although I also kinda miss the old top graphic
But change is also good!
Sorry, but I have found another issue. I don’t know whether it’s supposed to be this way, but on the homepage on the top (the blue marker line) says:
Inspiredology > Giveaway > 5000 Happy Birthday Presents
so actually it’s displaying a post , while I’m on the homepage.
Again, sorry for the multiple comments, I will shut now : )
Thanks!
Oh, and the little liquids on the homepage, that are displaying the amount of comments are a little off (move them down, like 4 px)
Thanks!
I love the new design, it’s still a little bit in the grungy style of the old one, but yet again it’s modernised just enough so it looks really cool!
Some points:
When you hover the navigation, the text stays light/white. Which is bad usability, because I have to hover off again to read what I was selecting (small, but rather annoying).
and
but still, this is cool as well 
WHERE HAS THE WOOD GONE IN THE FOOTER? I loved it soooo much
Honestly, I’m rather distracted by the visual design — there are too many different motifs at work. You have the clean, slick logo with the rss, but then you also have the torn edges. And the nav has the Yahoo-esque gradient (not a bad thing), but the mouseover throws me off. Then you have the notebook paper with the floral background (and the floral footer). My suggestion is to pick a motif, and stick with it throughout.
I can’t decide if I like the pink or not . . . I would maybe do red or burgundy. But . . . at times, I look and think the pink is amazing . . . I might need more time. (usually I am just looking at an rss feed so I don’t get any of the CSS)
The search box is cool and I think the test tube illustrations is nice. I think the notebook paper is distracting. Perhaps it could be something that follows on the lab theme better?
But, overall the site is great and the content is what brings people back.
I like the re-design, but find the type gets lost and hard to read with the light brown box that appears on the hovers in the header. It almost seems like a last minute temporary fix. Other than that, overall I like the design.
I really love the use of color on this site, as well as the subtle victorian-esque pattern in the background. I think your choice of typefaces fit very well together. The only thing I’m unsure about is the rough/torn look of some of the edges. It’s an all or nothing for me, and this particular look is interspaced with other straight edges, and I would like more consistency.
Overall, I love the new look!
The new design is really sharp, but I’m not entirely pleased with the user experience of navigating to find old + interesting posts. The categories at the top don’t fit the same paradigms (logo + web design versus freebies + alumni). I think some really useful work could be done on optimizing that for a more interesting look into the nice content you have here.
I find the sharing box at the bottom of posts a little overwhelming, though I understand what you’re trying to do with them. Likewise, the text ad placement right where it is with the author bio feels a little disjointed. Overall, the way the post ends, leading into the after-post action items, and then the comment section, is a very weird transition visually and functionally.
I -love- the page footer. Maybe link “Flickr Pool” to the main flickr pool page? And recent comments are interesting, but perhaps not functionally useful to the average reader. Could that be “top posts this month” or something else to bubble up the best content?
Overall, a really tremendous redesign … and some room to improve
Keep up the good work!
This is first time I visit this site after searching on google. I love the simple and beauty design, The layout, font and color on the bottom part of the site is quite nice…
It looks ok, but there is nothing mind blowing – i dont like the top menu bar – it is too big.
I like how the site “pops” without distracting you from the content of the posts. Well done!
Lol, delete my above comment, I was looking at the AllBusinessCards design.
I like the new header better than the last, but the footer is my favorite part. The light pattern mixed with the opaque boxes look great.
The colors are a little VistaPrint like, but I like the header image as well as the flash carousel.
I think the new design is cleaner, easier to read and to follow. Being picky I would have to agree with Adam on the hover for the navigation. However, the reason I subscribed and read your blog is for your post which are usually to the point and well written.
I like the cleanliness and paper textures of the site, but will miss the old inspiredology header, which was amazing!
The new design look really useful and clean.
But a still consider, like happens with the old design, that is not too much inspiring, as the content is. This web content is really inspiring, but the design is just a design more, nice, clean and useful, yes. But not inspiring enough to be in this web site as a content.
Anyway, changes are always welcome. Good luck.
The new design fulfils all my needs – that is; if the post isn’t clear enough in my reader I can be sure it will be clear on the page. That said it maintains a stylish design appropriate for its intended audience.
My only dislike is the hover state of the navigation – it really doesn’t fit with the rest of the site.
love the new site design, i feel it is much easier to navigate and easier to read.
still working off the old theme a bit, with the paper background on posts which is nice.
overall, i like it.
Cheers,
Eric