Try Tuts+ Premium, Get Cash Back!
Web Design Workshop #9: Illyria Insurance
tuts workshop

Web Design Workshop #9: Illyria Insurance

on May 4th 2012 with 15 comments

Web Design Workshop is our weekly community project where we ask readers to submit their work for your friendly, constructive criticism. It’s the perfect way to learn, offer opinions and have your own work critiqued! This week, a concept for an insurance company in Kosovo..

Rules of Engagement

Play nice! We deliberately select work which will benefit from advice and pointers. If you can’t be constructive in your comments, don’t. Other than that, offer any advice you can give. Feel free to link to examples and images which back up your points.

The Design

Web Design Workshop #9

This webdesign is a proposal for an insurance company here in Kosovo. Based on the square logo I started thinking about how best to redesign, making it clear to everyone what the company offers. For example, one of my goals was to keep things simple; the site needs to be usable for people of all ages. As Mies van der Rohe said “Less is more.” – Korab Hoxha

Looking for constructive criticism on your own work? Submit it for a workshop – most but not all submissions are published. Be patient though, there could be a queue..

 
Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Hi there! My name's Ian Yates. Welcome to Webdesigntuts+ :)  

Plus Premium
 
 
Note: Want to add some source code? Type <pre><code> before it and </code></pre> after it. Find out more
  • Atlante Avila

    I think it looks a bit confusing with the array of colors and unaligned pictures. It has potential but it’s missing more structure.

  • Kushan

    Very neat and good looking site with nice color balancing :)

  • http://grafixity.com Grafixity design

    Yea,nice looking site. Clean and crisp. I like how to follows the traditional billboard + 3 under columns model,works well.

  • Steve

    The text below the main logo could be readjusted for readability as it is in my opinion far too small, and it does not mesh well with the remaining fonts used in the design. The headline text for the three columns could also be a bit larger. I would be careful using such rectangular boxes around the Twitter buzz area as I instinctively see this as something that should be reserved for a button. The overall design is really nice however, you’ve balanced the colours well and did not make them far too similar. Nice work.

  • Acriax

    Nice composition with plenty of space and a solid color scheme overall. Seems like there’s mostly some small issues with the page:

    The navigation bar up top is a bit unclear. Why are some bold? Which page is currently being viewed?

    Make sure the most important pages are the furthest to the left in the navigation bar. Is “About us” really what the visitors would want to access first after coming to the homepage?

    “Log in” and “Sign in” means the same thing. I’m guessing it should be “Sign up”

    I’m not to fond of the decision to use two languages, so stick to either English or… is it Albanian in Kosovo?

    The smaller image furthest to the right is a bit unorthodox in its placing, but I like it! Gives the page a little personality and makes it more exciting.

  • David

    I like this design, very nice job. I like how clean and organized it feels. I would suggest a couple of things to improve it:

    1. I see no clear statement about what this page is about. Consider adding overlaid text on top of the main image (something like this http://www.statefarm.com/insurance/auto_insurance/auto_insurance.asp)
    2. I would experiment with font size, weight and color in order to give visual hierarchy to the 4 blocks of text at the bottom (specially the titles).
    3. I would add a twitter icon at the bottom in order to add some color and make it interesting.
    4. If there’s something you want your visitors to do make sure you state it clearly and prominently (I see no clear call to action right now).
    5. I would choose something to highlight (like the first block on the left for example) and add banner in a contrasting color or something of that nature. It would break the flow a little and make it more interesting. (something like this http://goo.gl/Qh7bQ)

    Kudos to you Korab, great job.

  • Chris

    I disagree with David, I don’t feel the cleanliness and organization that he does. The treatment of the featured images is really confusing to me. One is on a white background, one is on a green background, and one is raised past the others.. are they like tabs and that one is selected? To me it just looks like that image’s mask was turned off. I’m guessing it’s meant to be the same size as the others?

    There’s not really any clear sense of hierarchy here. For me, it was really hard to tell what’s important on the page. The three featured areas below the main image should all have the same styling I think, since they all serve the same purpose.

    There seems to be some redundant features – Log In and Member Access sound to me like the same thing.

    The gray box for the left-most featured area extends beyond the border of everything else.

    You need to work on consistency. For example, the left/right margins for the three featured images are (from left to right): 16px, 13px, 18px, 13px, 17px, 15px. This is just one of many inconsistencies throughout the design. In addition, your line heights are all over the place.

    Think about the client you’re designing for, and the nature of their industry or product. Insurance is meant to give people peace of mind, financial stability. Your design should reflect that, and give the user that feeling of rigidity and security. Having elements that are inconsistent in size, proportion, and placement is counter-productive to that goal.

    Hope all these tips help =]

  • Pingback: Web Design Workshop #9: Illyria Insurance | Shadowtek Hosting and Design Solutions

  • Brad

    Very nice colors, I like greens in those shades

    I think for me the Auto image being so out of line makes it feel unbalanced especially when the bottom 3 boxes of text are perfectly inline. I just “feel” that on a site like this the boundary’s might want to be clear without colors spilling over onto other colors like the light gray is. But that’s just me.

    You have chosen very attractive people to create the right mood, thats the first eye grabber I think. Well done there.

    I feel your Logo and company name is fine, I am not sure I would use that as contrasting colors. However a contrast color bar from the right edge of your logo over to(and through) your sign in links might be a positive move

    Well done!

  • http://www.d-line.info Korab Hoxha

    Thank you all for your comments. I just want to make clear somthing about this design, first of all this was just layout concept is not the final one because i do some changes frome your idea. For the text that is in web like log in / sign in i really don’t care because those are just some mistake when i was working so base on the idea that i wrote in short paragraph was ” on the square logo I started thinking about how best to redesign, making it clear to everyone what the company offers. For example, one of my goals was to keep things simple; the site needs to be usable for people of all ages.” So this was my idea about the design and in those 3 pictures last one was bigger than other was just because to see how does it look when you put mouse over in those images. Here is the last update that I’m working.

    http://i45.tinypic.com/fu5f10.jpg

    Soon i will send final work.

    Thank you again

    Best, Korab Hoxha

  • http://www.wonderinfotech.com/ Web Design Company India

    Thanks for sharing with us !! nice information keeps going on…

  • http://www.templaterange.com Joomla Templates

    very neat & clean.. Thanks for sharing.

  • Vlad

    Very nice job, the overall feeling is ok, but I have a few notes to make. First of all the “sales” section from the main menu, I think it’s not appropriate to use “sales”, only if you want to show me your quarterly sales, I would use “products” or “insurances”. The other think on the menu is “member access” which I think it should be moved, is it the same thing as the log in/ sign in?

    As David mentioned, I don’t see any call to action and I think it’s very important to have any sort of call to action for this type of site and activity.

    I am not really sure about the img with the dude in the car, is that an error or is that how you wanted to position it?

    Anyway good job Korab, keep it going

  • http://www.sentconcepts.com SentConcepts

    I like the color scheme and overall layout. Is the billboard animated? It also seems a little empty, where are the social links?

  • http://www.inglesnarede.com.br Renato Alves

    The design and the color balance is great. I really liked it. You was able to mix perfectly.

    The point that could be improved (as already stated by some folks above) is regarding text visibility on logo, the choice of ENglish or other language (it got me confused as I’m not an English speaker at first I thought everything was in English and later :( ), I also believe the twitter area could get better.

    There are more, but I as said, the folks above already covered.

  • http://puppetuts.com Arjun Rk

    Thanks for the wonderful post