Like most of us, I see and use a lot of websites every day.  Lots of websites are lousy, most are just so-so, but as a designer myself, I love it when I find a really nicely designed site out there.  Case in point: www.commoncraft.com.  It’s a husband and wife that run a business producing videos explaining technical terms like RSS and Wikis in language that non-technical people can easily understand, using paper cutouts and hand gestures to demonstrate.  You can see examples of their work here.

Anyways, about the site design itself: Despite having a moderate/large amount of content — lots of videos, a full store, lots of blog postings — the design and navigation is still kept very simple: just five buttons on the top navigation bar, with additional links on the bottom or side of the page when needed.

Of course, simple does not necessarily mean visually boring: the use of subtle textures and gradients, along with a bold (though not overly bright) color scheme still make the pages highly visually engaging. I also really enjoy the button rollovers on the top navigation bar: a nice change from the typical “change of background color” rollover effect on most website buttons (my own website included).  I don’t know about you, but buttons like this just make me want to click them.

The navigation bar button rollover effects: on the left is the button's inactive state, and on the right is it's hover state.

And to top it off, the site is built on a solid technical foundation: clean XHTML code with pure CSS styling —no deeply nested tables or tag soup here, folks.

As I build websites for my own clients, it’s always great to get inspiration from other places and people on the web that are doing it well.  So if you’re into web design as well, check out their site for yourself.  Oh, and their videos are great too.