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Review for euonyma : an icon site
A well-organized page, interesting use of colors, well-written and informative opening welcome note, and beautiful icon previews in the updates. On a closer look, the coding looks organized as well. The layout is fairly easy on the eyes but somewhat bland and drab. On a first glance, nothing grabs my attention or makes me want to really stick around. If it weren’t for the fact that there are icon previews in your updates, I’m not sure I would have stayed to look around. Your layout tells me nothing of your graphic [or even color-utilizing] skills.
Information
Site: euonyma : an icon site
Type: Graphics/Resource
Owner: Christina
Reviewed By: Sanosuke
Date Received: 12/18/06
Date Completed: month/date/year
Preview
Presentation
Coding
It looks like you understand coding fairly well. But might I suggest changing to purely DIV/CSS? This is a tutorial on creating a tableless layout. You’ll find that once you learn how to do that, the coding will be a lot more organized. Other than that, however, I found nothing wrong in your coding.
Layout
There could be a bit more padding between the top and bottom of the page and the top and bottom of your content area. Right now, it looks a bit messy.
Also, while the simplicity of the layout is a nice change from the sites out there that bombard you with graphics, it also doesn’t look incredibly appealing. Nothing stands out, and it is more or less just one color [green, green, purple, then more green…] Try adding some more color to the layout, and perhaps a graphic or two. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but eye-catching. Veve’s Blue Sand premade, Amanda’s Jingwen, and Jem’s jemjabella are all examples of well-made layouts that don’t particularly center around graphics, yet still have an eye-catching quality. Color contrasts, small details, and textures are all included. They’re not just one, flat color.
Moreover, your color contrasts between text and background are not nearly enough. In other words, the background for your content area is a little too dark and the fonts [body text, headers, and links] are a little too light. To add to that, the link’s hover color [that light purple] blends so far into the background that I’m unable to read your link if I hover over it. I don’t want to stop reading the text simply because I’ve hovered over them.
Content
Site
Your paragraphs are made of phrases that don’t quite make up a sentence. “A time when I should’ve been studying for SATs and APs, but then got sucked into the world of HTML and the infamous blog, xanga (it was stupid, I admit it).”, for example, is not a sentence, but a fragment. Adding “it was” before that would make it a sentence.
Your explanations are long [made longer and more tedious to read through by the short fragments that you like to add.] I’m not sure taking an entire paragraph to describe how much your graphics “sucked” in 2003 really does anything to explain the site you have today. Mentioning growth is a good thing, but dwelling on how much you failed as a designer in the past probably isn’t.
Instead of “In Depth of Icons” [which doesn’t make that much sense] for the title of your second section, perhaps something like “Why Icons” would be more proper.
- “high school” is two words, not one.
Icons
There are way too many icons per page. Even with a relatively normal internet speed, the page takes a while to load. Not to mention, with your navigation so short, the longer the icons make the content page, the more blank space we get to see. And seeing blank space is never really that great of a thing. On a larger resolution, your icons would maybe take up 30% of the page.
I would suggest 12-16 icons per page. That does seem to add to the number of pages you have, but it will cut down on loading time by a lot, and make the page look a bit more presentable. Also, something else to add to cutting down on loading time for the slower computers is to specify the width and height on each icon.
As per the quality of these icons, judging from just the first page of “view all” icons, most of them feature a similar look. [In fact, arashiavatar15.gif and arashiavatar14.gif don’t look like they’re different icons at all…] Many of them look like they had the same textures used and some [as mentioned in the last sentence] look almost exactly alike except for maybe a slight change in font or border. Some seem so texture-laden that the actual image used doesn’t look very clear and the icon becomes a little too overdone.
Some examples of well-done icons are: Avid, Catharsis, kaien, and Entity Icons. Notice the fact that there is always a clear focal point in all the icons: something that draws the attention of whoever is looking at the icon. Compare those icons to some of your icons [icons like acavatar2.gif and hnavatar3.gif] and notice how some of your icons seem so ladened with effects and textures that it loses its focus and the eye no longer has a place to look.
The age-old saying of “quality over quantity” comes into play now. You have a lot of icons in your site. Try going through and pruning. Keep the ones that you think are of the highest quality, and ditch some of the ones that were rushed or aren’t up to par anymore.
Credit
Because of how many sites you have listed, the title of this page should have an ’s’ at the end making it “Credit[s]”. Also, your Adobe Photoshop and Image Ready credits should be linked to the Adobe main page.
Final Statement
Your site is small and centered, so there’s a lot of room for expansion and improvement; and I don’t mean this in a bad way. I think you should go back and reorganize your icons a bit, pay more attention to detail, and perhaps add a bit more color and graphics to your main layout. [And as a final sidenote: have you ever tried adding more icon-related content, like textures or brushes?]