Cool Website Design

While surfing the web, trying to find a super-cool website to write about, I stumbled upon http://2012.beercamp.com/. A yearly event held for designers and developers, you would imagine Beer Camp's website to be highly creative. It is. Designed to look like a pop-up book, the website's designers used CSS 3D to create a floating book that not only allows you to click and drag the pages open, but also allows for some shifting of the book -- enabling partial side views of the pop-up cut-outs and adding to the 3D effect. I absolutely loved pop-up books as a kid and doubt that I am alone. The choice of a pop-up design was a smart choice, not only to show off the CSS 3D, but to appeal to the kid in all of us.

Beyond the 3D pop-up aspect of the site, the illustrations are also brilliantly designed. Each of the three pop-up pages features a silly-looking monster, cool font that also pops-up, and a rectangle of text that zooms towards you when you click on it. The text, which invites the reader to attend Beer Camp, is written like a Dr. Seuss storybook with off-beat rhymes that are as kooky as the illustrations. Each page features wonderful use of bold colors that suit the pop-up storybook design.

The only criticism I have of the site is that there isn't any feature that tells you more about the event. I would have liked to seen a clickable "about" button on the back of the book that would link you to more information about the Beer Camp event, its history and its purpose. However, the event's site was probably designed for a limited audience -- a group that was most likely already familiar with the event.

Here's a link to a site that features an in-depth look at beercamp.com's design:
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/17/beercamp-an-experiment-with-css-3d/