This week on Friday Focus: designs that feature artistic renderings of skyscrapers and other features of a long landscape. See how they’re incorporated below.

Designs of the Week

Great grungy attitude all over, even the shiny buttons have a bit of smudge on them. Nice little detail: I like how the carousel’s right arrow changes into a square block to indicate there are no images left to view.

Love the easy feel from the pastels, gradients, rounded corners, and happy illustrations. The “add your company building” feature is also a great concept for the purpose of this website.

Bold and high contrast. Even the borders and background patterns are rugged and chunky.

The animated stack of books is really clever, and clicking loads a page where the books is opened.

Love the non-rectangular frame for the carousel—I’m seeing more of these lately. Body text is a little to small though.

The open, airy header area looks great. This is also a rare gem of a liquid layout.

Interesting fisheye (a.k.a. OS X dock) hover effect on the navigation, though I can see not-so-seamless texture tiling!

I like how all the clickables are so big yet still look minimal and refined. It’s all in the type and colors, right?

Great treatment on the contact form and the image frames. Textures all over!

I seem to have a lot of grungy designs this week, and I’m not complaining! Love the way the sections are divided, with blocky headers and thick borders of stars.

Spacing needs a little work in the featured images area, but the header navigation animations are adorable. This site is so warm and friendly.

Good idea to use the neightborhood skyline as a divider for the different sections in this one-page site. Although I think the black background is a big disconnect from the light blue one at the top.

Not a fan of the lens flare, and the featured image could have been a slideshow/carousel instead.

Lovely animations, and I like the way the skyline is in a corner instead occupying the whole width of the screen.

I wish the quirkiness of the header illustration and logo carried over to the rest of the design.

Beautiful, beautiful illustrations of the Moscow skyline. The scrollbar navigation for the image works well too. I wish they were a little more interactive though, with tooltips or links. And hooray for another liquid layout.

The header canopy is a nifty touch to the header design. Love the mix of patterns too.

Social Media Weekly

Design – Perception and the design of forms – Part 4: Figure/ground
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Programming – Semantics and sensibility
“For a while now, sensible naming conventions and semantics have been confused.”

Mobile – HOW TO: Make Your Mobile Websites Act More Like Native Apps
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