What a design co. can learn from the 37Signals redesign
37Signals launched a redesign last week. They blogged about the thought process behind the redesign here. It’s always interesting to see how the portfolio site for a leading design company changes over time. When your job is designing web products you’re obviously far more sensitive to the prevailing trends in design.
A couple of things of note:
* They try to redesign their homepage at least 1-2 times a year.
* Notice how vertical the page is and how little of the page’s content is above the fold. They are confident you will scroll down.
* Compared to their old design (below), notice the palette cleansing use of white space. This is a design company that understands restraint. It’s a little Apple-like, no? And I don’t mean that in a bad way.
* The page is very clickable, but the technology is not fussy.
* Like the old site, there is no nav and consequently, no tricked out anchored links with a jquery scroll to help the user navigate the page.
I have to agree that it’s a definite improvement over the old site. What the site loss in fun, it gained in seriousness. I guess that’s the point.
