This Friday Focus we’re featuring another animal mascot that’s also growing in popularity: the octopus! Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Designs of the Week

Get solid WordPress themes, plugins, and even design training from iThemes.

iZenius

Several subtle animations running here—the clouds, textured waves, and that sliding effect in the centered logo. Unlike the other designs here actually the octopus isn’t featured in a huge way, but it’s equally clever the way it’s holding the background “paper”.

Tentacle Tunes

It takes a whole screenful before you can get to the menu, so that’s a little inconvenient but things like these appear to be lax with band and more informal sites.

Hello Studios

I like the subtlety to the textures and the playfulness of the design; from text to shapes everything is “gooey” looking. Although I’m a little concerned with the manual scroll between sections. The extra space is there so that there’s a transition when you’re using the left-side navigation, but what if you want to take the navigation into your own hands? Something to consider.

Social Media Weekly

Typography, CSS, Performance – Web Font Performance: Weighing @font-face Options and Alternatives
“The goal of this article is to look at the various web font implementation options available, benchmark their performance, and arm you with some useful tips in squeezing the most bang for your font byte. I will even throw in a new font loader as a special bonus!”

Web Standards, Semantics, CSS – Places It’s Tempting To Use Display: None; But Don’t
“This entire post is based on the premise that display: none is bad for accessibility.”

User Experience – Why You Need A UX Toolbox
“Our UX Toolbox is helpful because it allows us to keep a basic set of tools together in one place. When it’s time to head to a client’s office for a meeting, we don’t need to spend time gathering things – they’re already ready to go. If we know that we’ll need something special, we can add it before we leave. But for the most part, we can rest easy knowing that we’ll have what we need.”

CSS, Accessibility – Replacing the -9999px hack (new image replacement)
“My friend Scott Kellum, design director at Treesaver, has now sent me this refactored code for hiding text, which I hereby christen the Kellum Method.”

Typography, CSS – Pragmatic, practical font sizing in CSS
“We now have a self-contained font-sizing framework which should hopefully mean we never need to define another font-size declaration again!”

Create unique, extraordinary websites with Squarespace. No experience necessary!