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One of the most important communities in the blogosphere regarding CSS and Web Development/Design is CSS Globe. Founded by Alen Grakalic, web standards designer and developer, CSS Globe is the home for good tutorials, news, great community and knowledge sharing. And the reason for this coverage is that CSS Globe has a brand new design with lots of interesting user interface elements.

No more coffee cup

While the glasses are still present in this new design, the coffee cup was left behind. I’m talking of course about visual differences between the previous version and the new one. The differences are major and the new design has mainly the name from the old one and some graphic elements. Apart from that, we deal with a brand new design with lots of different approaches.

New Refreshing User Interface

From the structural point of view, the new CSS Globe has 2 columns instead of 3. This thing will simplify user’s work in finding the desired resource. Now the topics are separated in 2: first are the articles from CSS Globe editors and below are listed the CSS Globe news from the community. This is a good way to separate these 2 sections and still have a normal reading behavior for the user. The sidebar is used in a standard way, for different actions, user account and advertising.

What I like maybe the most in this new design is how the community news are displayed. For this Alen made a great choice by creating a box in the right side of the preview, where he placed basic information: user, date, comments and permalink. This approach is good first because it is easy to see the news and then it provides balance to the design by inserting proper space between the sidebar and content.

Also another thing that is on the positive side is the new color scheme. To be honest I wasn’t the biggest fan of the previous CSS Globe banner. And the overall orange-yellow aspect of the header was bad. Now we have instead a clean header with a strong new logo and a simple dark-red/gray color scheme. Additional to these new changes I like also how Alen managed to embed the dotted line into the design. It works perfectly with the logo and the overall theme of the site.

Conclusion

Overall the site looks great and it can stand now as a model for simple and clean designs. Hopefully this redesign will boost the number of visitors and it will consolidate CSS Globe’s position in the CSS community. It is definitely one of the best redesigns of 2009. Cheers!

User Interface
User Experience
Design
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