Grids are an absolute must when building any design, but this week’s featured sites apply the rhythm of an even grid to lay out their portfolios, becoming the first and pretty much only thing you see when you come visit them. The result is a very neat look—or perhaps stark to other pairs of eyes—but very honest.

This week’s featured designs use the not-so-common method of horizontal scrolling to tell their stories, each screenful a page or idea to absorb on your way to getting to know them fully.

This week’s Friday Focus shines the spotlight on designs with comic book-inspired aesthetic, each with its distinct take on the kick-butt art form. Check ‘em out after the jump!

We’re curating a short list of sites celebrating this lovely date. Happy 11-11-11 Friday Focus!

Happy Friday Focus! Today we’re looking at designs with a bit of a “dip” in them—one content area leading into another with a nice little curve. Can you spot them? Read on!

This week on Friday Focus we’re featuring a specific type of texture being used in websites: denim. Is it the new wood pattern? Let’s find out.

This week’s Friday Focus features designs that incorporate the moon in them.

We’ve seen a lot of slanting, skewed designs before, but there seems to be an even more specific trend related to that: cropping away text by the use of diagonal lines, as though their edges have been slashed away.

Not everyone is busy daily with CSS, which makes it understandable you don’t know CSS layout structure and code by memory. It’s good to have some good sources providing ready basic code to get started on a new website. The pro of using these layout is that they are already tested and bug free.

This week’s Friday Focus features not just any kind of bird, but owls. They’ve been used everywhere from personal portfolios to mainstream portals and we’re going to check them out.

Designers have tried to achieved the three-dimensional look on websites in different ways, and we’ve touched on this in the form of folded elements, parallax scrolling, and 3D type. This week, we’re looking at three more inspiring techniques that push the envelope and make websites more interactive than ever.

This week on Friday Focus, we’re looking at sites that revolve around iconized representations of their content.