Wine Brokers

Picking up the the red of the logo in a triangular pattern is nice. Good palette, rather conservative look overall, but pleasing. It bothers me a little bit that no one element stands out as a grabber (the "why are you here?" device) -- everything blends, possibly too much.

I wonder if one of your other designs will feature the logo more prominently. I think that could be smashing. Will you be letting us have a look at the other two when you develop them?

Brief mentioned that the client wants it "contained" [ie: not much floating/whitespace]

How novel: Another client that doesn't like white space. :) I like your design, but it's too 'boxes within boxes' to me. Not sure the client wants his audience thinking his wine is 'in the box' or 'imprisioned'. Wineries are free places with lots of open space. This leaves me scratching my head about why he/she would want to give the OPPOSITE impression?

Overall, you nailed the brief and got the wine colors to reproduce on the web. Nice job. I would make the body text more closely match the logo font -- use serifs, probably Georgia, for the body text and titles. Oh, and I think the logo should exist without a white stroke around it. It looks strange with it currently.

Good stuff!

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Powerpoint is not a design application

I really like the colors you're using and the imagery, I agree with the comments above, about felling too boxed, maybe get rid of the red border and make the bottom image bleed out.

I would work a little more on the navigation. Even though it carries the harmony with the colors, I think it's a little big, and maybe put a very thin line to separate it from the text. Hope that helps.

Great work!!

Nice start, but this definitely needs some tweaking, especially in the fonts and margins. First off, I counted like 4 or 5 different fonts, which is too many for one page. The other problem is that I don't really feel them working together, especially the white "Exporting. . ." font right above the large sans-serif title font.

My first thought when looking at the preview is "Why is everything so scrunched?" You're dealing with a LOT of space, but cramming the title close to the banner, and the text close to the title, etc. My biggest suggestion is to give yourself more margin space. Let everything breathe. I agree about the navigation, but I think instead of a line, you just need more space.

The small red box in the bottom right corner looks random. Why is it there?

Another thing is if the client doesn't like white space, it seems a little strange to have as much space as you do below the text. That's valuable real estate that images, promotions, etc can be used for. I understand that you don't have the actual content (at least text) that you'll be implementing, but you may want to think about that when showing the client.

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Perfectly Lost Designs

thanks for the comments everyone. very helpful. this is a first draft, and the project has a reasonably strict budget for the design stage, so i'm not doing too much work on each draft. They are more to represent an idea to the client, for them to choose which direction they want to go in, and then further refine it until it's good enough for production.

Will you be letting us have a look at the other two when you develop them?

Probably, yes. They'll be done over the next week or 10 days, I'll post them here as separate critique entries.

I would make the body text more closely match the logo font -- use serifs, probably Georgia, for the body text and titles.

Personally, I prefer the contrast of a serif fot for headings and titles and navigation with a sans-serif for the main body text - I find sans-serif better for on-screen readibility. However, I'm not set on the fonts yet, they are just sort of in there for the moment until the client wants me to refine the drafts a bit.

I would work a little more on the navigation. Even though it carries the harmony with the colors, I think it's a little big, and maybe put a very thin line to separate it from the text. Hope that helps.

Yep, I agree. Originally I had the navigation horizontal underneath the photo at the top, but moved it to the left and vertical to break up the content area a bit. If they like the look of this, I'll redo the nav properly.

One of my favourite winery sites to date: http://www.stemiltcreekwinery.com/

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Perfectly Lost Designs