Hey,

I'm in the process of starting a new music critique website and still in the design process at the moment.

What I have at the moment is this:

http://www.distantreverb.com/

I liked it at first. But the more I look at it, the more I hate it.

I think the colours are too light at the moment.

What do you guys reckon?
Any suggestions on colours, spacing, layout, font, etc etc would be much appreciated.

Some of the sites I'm comparing it to are pitchfork.com and drownedinsound.com

Regards

I agree with the above thoughts but this site very interesting.

Cynthia Kurtz

I like how you use red colors in your design. pokies

Wow, reading through the comments is horrible. Sorry about that. Adam_Smith392, you're blocked.

Anyway, the design is pretty easy to go through and allows the content to come through. It doesn't get in the way. I don't have any opinions on the orange-red. I would assume that's just a part of your branding.

I feel the album items presented on the homepage are better presented than on the album page. There's a difference in size between the two. The extra padding and empty space within the gray div on the larger album view seems less attractive to me.

The main menu (home, albums, gigs, playlists, about) should be more prominent if it's meant to be important. It gets lost up there partly due to it's small size and lack of contrast.

hope that helps.

If you're still listening here's a couple things i see right off the bat:

Colors: Your color scheme tends to lean towards the pastels which doesn't to me convey the correct atmosphere for this kind of site. I think the main culprit is the background gradient, the red/orange you start with is itself a little creamy, now blend that with white down the page and you have the starting of an Easter-ish color scheme. Maybe try changing your base color to something with less white in it or just dropping the gradient all together.

Conflicting Elements: I think there may be a bit of conflicting design here with the kind of random mix of round and straight elements, i think at this point the site would probably look a lot better with just straight elements and focused effort to unify sizes and borders for like elements.

Navigation: Your navigation menu is just to small, this should be a much easier control to see and read, for sure up the font size and maybe play with the horizontal spacing between the button graphics.

Logo: I think it's fine if anything a little dull but the main thing here is that there is no reason for you to be using a poorly rendered raster image of your site's name, just use plain text like a hyper link with appropriate params and style it to the same dimensions and location of your current image, it will look a lot crisper and be a little more sound structure wise.

Spacing: I think this is your theme's biggest problem and I think it's one of the hardest things to figure out. To put it plainly your sites elements aren't spaced in a way that lets me easily discern what belongs to what from a glance and instead I am forced to focus and read each element and compare them to understand the structure of the site, here's an example:

On the right hand side of the front-page you have an about 'blurb', it's in a grey container and the margins for the header, paragraph and container itself all seem to be the same. This complete uniform set of margins makes it hard for me to tell the structure quickly. Off the top of my head I would move the paragraph and the header closer, increase the space between that island and the 'Featured Live Review' widget while decreasing the margins between 'Featured Live Review' text and the following images. Try to tighten up the visual relationship of elements that go together and provide more white-space between groups that don't have relationships. I would go ahead and take a look at cssbeauty here and just take note of the front-page from a glance, you can easily discern groups of elements and that the page is broken into distinct areas and most of the time this is accomplished with simple margins and padding to create a uniform set of rules for your elements spacing.

Hope some of these babble helps, pretty cool site actually, keep polishing and it will shine.