thinking of a change

[ikthius]

hey everyone,

been wanting a change for my site, mainly the looks of it, but not a major change.

anyway, the site as it loks just now: http://www.honeycomb-web.co.uk
and the slightly altered new site: http://www.honeycomb-web.co.uk/new/index.html
I will be changing the yellow computer image soon, thinking of taking a pic of my computer with google on it and making it a yellow.

please not no links work yet as it is just to see what it looks like and what people thought.

also in my main site I have the portfolio page, however I was going to change this to a jQuery gallery that fades every 5-10 secs with the testimonials at the side, but neater.

what you guuys think of the change of design?

if you don’t like it tough hehe only joking, but if you don’t what would you do?

[Matt]

Speaking directly in terms of colour moods for a second, black in it’s lone appearance, or complimented by a contrasting colour gives the mood of elegance while yellow gives a mood of happiness. Though, when you put the two together in a non-contrasting way such as a gradient, it gives the mood of deceit, illness, and hazard. This is just something to ponder. For example:

[img]http://i26.tinypic.com/rksxao.png[/img]

The "offending" parts have been marked in the red box. The other two ends of the image could be considered OK, at least in my view, mostly because those are two colours/gradients that occur commonly in nature. While the red-box may be found in nature, it’s usually on an animal or a substance (such as hazard signs/barrels/etc) that is considered "bad" to the average person. (Oddly, red isn’t, much because the colour red in the mind usually overrides warnings because of our instinct that red = happiness, pleasure, or romance.)

My suggestion: Give the yellow a slightly brighter hue, but rich saturation and display it along the black solidly without any gradient. Like so:

[img]http://i25.tinypic.com/act011.png[/img]

This is a dual benefit. For one, yellow and black can both exercise their moods of elegance and happiness, and secondly, it gives the eye less complicated colours to view. Many good colour schemes use few colours, up to about five, but the gradient uses about this much:

[img]http://i26.tinypic.com/259qt.jpg[/img]

compared to:

[img]http://i27.tinypic.com/2ltpzs4.jpg[/img]

Other than that, change the shadowing to be a smooth shadowing much like the drop-off shadow on the tabs above (Articles, Forums, Videos, Downloads), have the background blend in with the main background a bit, and always make your footer containing the legal information fully opaque with a colour that contrasts white. If a legal issue was to ever occur, you want to make sure that the user can’t claim that he/she couldn’t readily find the legal information.

Cheers :)

EDIT
I just thought, using the CMYK black would give the impression of a more relaxed, elegant, happy mood. As such:

[img]http://i31.tinypic.com/6sqbk8.png[/img]

[Author]

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