HappyCog.com the design studio of Jeffery Zeldman just re-launched there site with a brand new look, its an industrial news thou ! also i am in direct competition with them :P (yeh really ! i swear we are rivals :P) but still there work is gr8, simple, clean and great esthetics, its always great to see such nice layouts. For a hungry mind like me every day sites like these should be launched !

In the current erra, web2.0 look & feel have become the key requirement of many clients, and in some cases things get pushed to a level where it crosses the line, extremely heavy layouts, non usable for many users, disappearing navigation with ajax ! and literally every free ajax or Javascript effect found on the internet is used, this thing is quite common as in past you must have remember the javascript effects for the mouse movement “a revolving clock around the mouse”, pop ups, & lots of moving tags and stuff like that was common around many places ! and now its AJAX !

I feel design should be clean, with enough white space to breath, navigation kept as prominent as possible, proper spacing and line hight for text nice colors that are fresh, and classy ! Heading tags diffrentiating not only with boldness but also with spacing, a layout should be clean divided into grids / coloums, a good example is look at the newspaper why for the last 20 years it is placed in a grid of coloums ! is it because we are used to it or is it because it is more usable ! thou they do lack line hight cause they need to save space for advertisement grr…