Soulbounce is a daily must for me. It is in my morning coffee of bookmarks. Besides the artist reviews and streaming music, it is one of the best designed blogs on the net. Designed by PhattyGirl who I reached out to, to discuss how she came up with such a well planned and designed site. We as designers need to start givin’ a lil’ love where it is due, and since I ran across this site a few months ago, I have been mesmerized by it’s clean look and scalable up or down architecture. From first look I figured it was a Wordpress build but further investigation shows it’s a Movable Type backend.

“Balanced Design”

The one thing I need to point out is about Soulbounce.com is that it is a very well written site. It is updated daily so since it isn’t static which leads to creating a stale look no matter how great the layout. The site structure is flawless and they way the images and YouTube videos are all the same width makes the site balanced, coordinated and consistent, a style I definitely stress with blogs. If your gonna have a page of posts, the one thing you want to make sure of is some form of consistency or you’ll end up with a page that looks like this instead of this.

Site Breakdown

The style of the header alone is one of praise from me. The large simple navigation buttons and the rollover paintstroke add a nice touch. Images are large, bright and consistent in size which adds the uniformity synonymous with big budgeted sites with a design department. The simple breadcrumb navigation is large and visible (Archive>>Interviews) and the three (3) column layout makes the intangibles of the site always consistent in position. The blogroll and the large number of outside site links in the right column are very seamless. It does not seem too long because it just flows because of the color scheme PhattyGirl selected. The date stamp is original and the sepia tone for the images and slick font style used in the “Behind the Groove“ for the artists interviews is very creative. I must say as far as blogs go this is definitely in my top 5 of the best designed weblogs online. This should always be a starting point for inspiration before a designer fires up Photoshop to begin their design.