Easy Website Tweaking -- 75% Finished
a small website (uncoded) project by jdueck

This is an easy project for someone who understands the art of typography. Our new website is 75% finished, but we want the typography to be better, plus a couple of other things.

Winning this contest won't require a large volume of design work. It's all about finalizing the details of an existing design.

Update 9-Nov-09 GMT

Thanks to everyone who submitted designs so far. I decided to do a public update so that everyone gets the same information.

1. TYPOGRAPHY IS 80% OF THIS PROJECT

When this website is finished, it will be a stunning example of awesome web typography. So far, only a couple of designers have put significant thought into the typography. Most designers have concentrated on things like gradients, illustrations, etc. Please note that the winning design will be the one with the best typographic design.

If you'd like to learn more about typography, I suggest reading The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. It's considered a must-read for anyone doing typography. It might be too late for this project, but it will help you in the future.


2. FONTS - CHANGED MY MIND

Originally I was planning to use a font stack (i.e. a priority list of fonts available on the users' computers with "reasonable" substitutions. I have changed my mind and decided to go with @font-face embedding instead.

@font-face is a brand new technology that is just beginning to gain traction. Essentially, you tell the browser which font to use, and you serve the font files along with the web page. There aren't many quality fonts with licenses that allow for @font-face embedding, but there are enough.

The three fonts I'm interested in using are:

Museo and Museo Sans
http://nicewebtype.com/fonts/museo-and-sans/
These fonts are like siblings. Museo Sans is similar to Gill Sans. Museo is a serif version which goes nicely with its sans cousin.

Graublau Web
The bold version of this makes nice headlines.
http://nicewebtype.com/fonts/graublau-sans-web/

Note that the text in these examples is real text, not images. Try selecting the text. Yeah, font embedding is really cool and opens up lots of new possibilities.

I've uploaded a new version of my original PSD file showing one way these fonts might be used.

Part of me wonders if Graublau is visually compatible with the Museo family. However, I really love the high-impact of that main headline. The main headline is quite important from a marketing point of view, so that has to be balanced with the general aesthetics of the page.

Update 14-Nov-09 GMT

Hi everyone. Please don't submit any more entries. We have decided what we want to do.