Collis Ta’eed, co-founder of Envato, is one of my favorite designers. His designs have a certain quality that you don’t see just anywhere. They’re simplistic, stylish, and unique.
What makes the designs stand out of the crowd? Small touches. Little things that add to the design, and give it a more polished look. They’re fairly easy effects to pull off if you know how.
Edge Effects
Anywhere a background of one color meets another, the edge can be softened with a little “bevel” effect.
As you can see, what ends up as a neat edge between two sections is a simple trick involving a dark one-pixel line, and a tiny gradient. If you want to see a lot of this effect in action, visit the Blog Action Day site. If you have a way to zoom in on parts of the screen, try using it to observe how the effect is done. (The ColorZilla extension for Firefox has such a feature.)
Spacing
What’s not there is often more important as what is. Ample paddings and margins and a bit of spacing between lines of text go a long way to improve a design. Whitespace leaves the user room to breathe as they navigate a site. If you cram everything together, you end up with a mess.
Subtle Gradients
Flat colors will only get you so far. A subtle gradient here or there will liven things up. Be careful of gradients, though, and keep them subtle. If you make the color shift too pronounced, the result will be very tacky.
Can you spot all of the gradients in the image above?
Conclusion
Obviously Collis Ta’eed isn’t the only designer to use these techniques. They’re everywhere. Collis simply uses them well, and often. Keep these techniques in mind, practice them. And have a look at the sites in the Envato network; besides having good design, they have some great content worth trying.
You do know that Collis only designed a few of these don't you? http://valendesigns.com/ did most…
No, I did the code and Collis did the designs. I'm a WordPress power user and can and do design with the same level of detail for my personal and other client projects, but as far as Envato sites go Colllis does the designing and I do all the coding.
See, I know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, Envato owns these sites, but the designs were outsourced.
No, they were not outsourced. And valen works for Envato.
@Lachi and @sjl… you are so wrong !
valem just does the slicing and coding from Collis's designs…
You should know your facts before posting.
Collis has designed every single one of the Envato sites and influences the way most sites look today !
Those are some beautiful sites. I could not believe that site Haven Works was real. People actually visit it?
I don't know… It's been around for awhile, and the content certainly changes. I, too, wonder if people actually visit, besides when someone links to them as an "OMG. Bad. Design." example.
Nice themes. Say hello to your designer. I always like people which can produce masterpieces pictures, music or sites as well.
I like freelanceswitch.com site. I am interested how dim/highlight effect on upper menu buttons he did? Is it image rollover or CSS?
It's CSS. It looks like an a:hover trick. The links are set to be a light color, and then a CSS rule along the lines of #navbar a:hover { color: #000; } darkens the text when hovered over.
I like the edge effects in the 1st and the 3rd site, makes the site look more…digital.
I checked envato’s site and found that the tutorials it gives are really handy. Also i like the marketplace because you can make a little profit or just buy some themes. I found out that wordpress themes are quiet popular merchandise on a lot of sites.