Hyuu Designs
Information:
- URL: http://hyuu.chanlu.org/
- Owner(s): Mitsuki
- Site Category: Graphic Design
- Reviewed By: Josh
- Stats:
Your design makes a pretty good first impression on your website. The top layout image is pretty interesting, except I had to squint there for a second to see what it really was. I do like the font choice you used, pretty neat. After that, it’s hard to say what I feel. It’s organized, yet it’s not. I immediately see five link things, a date, the time which doesn’t stay current, and then an excerpt. I will break these down later. Overall, fairly good though- your site loaded right away too!
The Layout–Design (17/20)
I tested it in both Firefox and Safari, great in both. No issues really in compatability. Starting from the top, I am a bit confused as to the very top of your design. Why is that low opacity layer there? To me, it looks like you cut it from another part of an image or something. Personally, I think it looks kinda goofy, plus with the color burn with the layer right under it, it’s too much. I think it would look better if left normal. I do like how you had the anime character in there, it goes nicely with the rest of your layout. It is getting a little dark, so I might have picked a couple of popping colors myself to put in there. I like how you have the drop-down menus, but like my first impression said, I was a bit confused with all that navigation on the left. You might want to change that to make it more seperate looking. The date and time I also am not a fan of. If you want to do that, I would say to put them in your secondary navigation somewhere using a Javascript that is up to the second. Without a time clock that is going to tell you the real time, it’s almost a waste of space. Maybe replace that spot there with a link counter or something, or how about the version number and title? The little featured thing is nice too, but I was a bit confused on “what” was actually featured. Yes, I saw Bleach, but I wasn’t sure if it was a wallpaper, layout, blahaha. Just a little thing to point out.
I really like your CSS. Similar to mine at Hikaru Hoshi in a few ways. I’m a big fan of the capitalization and small-caps. Your color choices match your design, but I think the brown might overpower everything sometimes. For some reason, it seems a little too…”dumpy”. Sorry, I’m not sure how to put that in understandable words that are still polite. When you hover over the secondary navigation links, the font spacing or something seems to change slightly. To me it’s not a big deal, but some other people think it is. To end this section, I really do like your footer. Nice way to end^^ Overall, very nice.
The Layout–Coding (10/10)
To start off, kudos for having a Doctype and meta tags. You also use a stylesheet which is almost a neccessity now. I also like the fact that you have the bookmark icon, nice personal touch. Unfortunately, I was mainly reviewing this in Safari, which doesn’t show that. Darn. Good job on slicing and still coding everything right in tables-makes everything load faster. I love that your source coding is so neat and organzied. You use the div id calling that makes everything go a lot nicer in your coding. I’m not a fan of the whole CSS, HTML, and XHTML validation thing, but congrats for being valid!
Content (36/40)
- Quality Of Graphics & Resources (8/10): Many of your graphics are very nice. Your avatars will be discussed later, so lets move on to some other content. Your 404 error signs are okay, but I really only like the three newest signs. Most of the others seem a little plain. Actually, this goes for all your signs. Your newer ones are very nice, but the older ones seem either a little dull or too busy.
Your wallpapers are almost the same- kind of hit or miss. To me, either I love it, or I really don’t like it much. Your first few again gave me a great vision of your wallpaper section. After that, the rest seem to be only a texture or two with an anime PNG. They also seem a little dull in sharpnish too, or is that just me? They seem either blurry or too much of some texture. Then back again, your first page in order of ID are nice again. It’s just a little odd- you seem to be great, medicore, and great again. Haha. I do like you are using ccounter, it’s nice, but I always thought it was a pain after you get a lot of stuff. Something to keep a watch out for. I also would say that you might want to make more sizes of wallpapers for your visitors. I would reccomend that you add a few widescreen sizes, and then maybe a 1280×960 for higher resolutions? I know a lot of people are all getting new computers, and most of those have widescreen resolutions now.
Your PNGs are nicely extracted- good job! No real white splotches when I tested them on top of a black background.
Your 100×100 textures seem a little boring, but I don’t think I’m very good at them either. Your larger textures aren’t much different either. Also, in both instances, I am not a fan of how you have people download them. The small textures are okay, but if you want a pop-up for your large textures, you should really fix that to have it be a bigger window. I had to manually resize it so that I could see what I would be right-clicking to save. Mentioning that, you may want to say how to actually “download” them… To end this section, your tutorials are nice. Pretty common ones, but that’s okay.
I really kept out the story for this section because to me, I could critique more about your graphics and resources. I’ll talk more about this in the wrap-up of your review. - Updating (5/5): Looks like you update often enough. Good job^
- Content Quantity (5/5): You are a fairly large site once you look into everything. You may want to expland on some things, but you kept me interested for about 15 minutes on everything minus your story. Pretty good!
- Spelling & Etc (5/5): Nothing to worry about^
- Creativity & Uniqueness (8/10): On the graphic design section of your site, you are pretty good. However, I think that you may have just recently found your niche. Your older work isn’t as unique and creative as your newer designs. On your literature section, you are very unique in that. This is what got you most of your points.
- Our Link (5/5): Our link was easy to find on all your pages. Thank you!
Your Special Content (4/5)
You have an abundance of avatars and you are pretty good and making them. I do not like the ones that seem to have three pictures inside of them cut up, I think that looks a little cluttered. I also think you need to prun some of the avatars on the last pages which also happen to be your earliest creations. Everyone understands that they were your earlier work, but you’ve grown so much! Now that you have over 100, you are probably safe to get rid of some of those ones. My favorites are these couple of avatars. Oh, as I was picking out my favorites, I saw that you had quite a few of almost the same avatar. You changed one thing and had two of three copies of almost the same thing. To me, that’s just a waste of space. I’m just not a fan of it. Of course, I guess it depends on your visitor, but that’s my two-cents. You should also have a link to the main avatar page once someone uses the drop-down menu to choose a category. Some lazy viewers may just leave if they can’t find that link again. Eh, here are some avatars that probably need to go. All in all though, you are very good at avatars!!
An Overall Wrap-Up (13/15)
Your site truly is one that most people should visit every so often. Since I first saw your site as a graphic design resource site, I did not mention your literature section until this part of your review. In your site, you have an entire part dedicated to a story that you have been writing. It’s pretty amazing! I suggest that everyone go and read it! Then thing is, though, my first impression was confusion and ignoring of your story. Your website is called Hyuu Designs, so I thought it should really only be designs. This is my main concern. You may have too much on one site. If you want to call it a design website, then you probably should make a separate site for your literature project. This is just a suggestion, of course, but I think it would even possibly get you more views. Maybe have a small splash page that lets visitors choose to read the story or look into your graphics? How it is right now, to me at least, your graphic design seems to be overpowering your story. Truly, I think something that takes so long such as that should deserve its own site and glory. Hope you have had some of these thoughts before?? Other than that, your site is great, and I know that I will be visiting off and on!