So, I have been a fan of Bryan Veloso’s blog (Avalonstar.com) and his design style for years now. I’ve seen avalonstar go through quite a few design revisions and have liked them all. I say like, because while many have fell in love with his design style, I felt them to be great, just not a design that I personally would fall in love with. That in no way negates him as a designer, just my preference.
That was until his most recent release of Revyver Labs [link]. To me Bryan has become such a great designer and I love the style of this site. From its open spacious feel, to the slight transparent glow on his Gotham laden headers, I love it all. I especially love the rollovers in his sections. It seems he uses a semi-transparent PNG overlay on rollover that brings attention to the download links - that’s rad dude. Rad. Also, as some may expect, I dig the dark textured feel to the background and the white space (that’s not so white).
This site has the perfect amount of glossiness, seen in the logo, but not overkill. From text treatments, semi-transparent headers to the sleek and clean navigation, this site rocks the hizzy. Nice job Bryan. You have l33t sk33lz.
Peace.
Pretty nice site there. Only problem I could think of is that if someone has a small resolution, they wouldn’t get much content “before the fold”. But who has tiny resolutions today, large monitors are so cheap.
The highlight images are indeed very nice, they work really well with the site.
Awesome job Bryan.
Labs.Revyver.com is hotness! I’m a sucker for dark themes, and Bryan’s been rolling them out left and right the last few months.
Speaking of rollouts — liking the Junglized lightbox — haven’t seen that before.
@Brendan - I call it ‘ZoomBox’ - a jQuery variation of FancyZoom coded by yours truly.
I really like Bryans work too, it has good detailing, just as your design here, Rogie. You can easily tell if a design got the extra 10% of details.
Btw. your Zoombox is kinda buggy in Opera 9.5 in OS X.
He clearly has talent, however I feel he could have made a better effort to repeat the background image here
http://revyver.com/
for resolutions over 1680.
The spacey theme over at the design in question though is lush and against the grain.
@Tor Thanks so much for the heads up about the ZoomBox error. It should now be fixed and working in Opera 9.5 OSX.
Alistair: Haha, I knew I’d find somebody that would stretch their browsers out that far. I had a background image saved just for that, but I didn’t think anybody would really call me out on it.
Now I’ll be working on getting that pattern to stretch out to 1920. :X
(Feel free to connect this to my last one if this seems spammy.)
Hah, I pressed post before I was able to write a decent reply to the post. I really appreciate the write-up and it’s interesting to see what about my style draws different people in. To be honest, I’ve been trying my hardest to try completely different things. Avalonstar being one of them.
This isn’t what I had planned on Revyver Labs looking like from the beginning. It was supposed to be red and bold and such. But then I thought to myself, if it’s going to be a Revyver site, then why am I deviating from the style I love so much anyway? So I just played around with the sky until I was happy with it and took the rest of the time to lay things out much the same way I did on the main site.
Whew, long winded already. Anyway, thanks again. I hope I’ll be able to keep on wow-ing you in the future. :)
@Bryan - I think it’s great that you approach your designs with an “I want it to look this way” attitude, yet allow yourself to be deviated from that. Many times, I feel like I have come upon a good design by tweaking things till they feel right, even if it isn’t what originally I had wanted.
Keep up the good work bro and I can’t wait to see what you come up with in the future!