The basic design idea of this site is to let the menu bar, text area and background image place on the top of a flat, light-blue glass with reflection of images in the glass and shadow under it, which intends to show a three dimensional appearance.
Here is the homepage of Incline Capital LLC:
http://www.inclinecapital.com/
My evaluation is as follows:
Navigation
There are one primary navigation system on this website, including Company, Focus, Investment, Contact and Home. Each of them (except "Contact" and "Home") has a secondary navigation. Whenever people click a main link, its sub directories will appear in an indent format, which looks like the tree structure in Windows file systems. The advantage of this design is to display the hierarchy clearly so that people can always know where they are within the architecture of this site and can always go back to the home page by clicking the link “Home”.
Architecture
As the vertical indent format of navigation links shows, the architecture of this site is simple and clear, which is up to only two levels of directories. Although people need to click sub links to view more information under a certain subject, it is still easy and convenient.
Content/Typography
The font of all the text is Century Gothic in original design. I changed them into Arial because first, the width of Arial font is thinner, which means I can put more words on one page without scrolling down (people are not willing to scroll down page when browsing web pages); second, it is easier to recognize since the background image is bright.
The techniques to highlight content are bold weight, such as 'Incline Capital LLC' in Company introduction, and underline decoration, such as 'Target Markets' in Focus introduction.
I think the labels of the navigation are clear because when I click a main link, it shows me both general information of this subject in the text area and sub links in the menu bar. When I click sub links, more details about this subject continuing appears in the text area.
Grid/Structure
I used 'div' tag to show contents of all the subjects in the same page (frame) in order to make the structure of the site stays consistent as people go from one subject to another.
In my point of view, the focal point of this site is the rolling images in background. First, these images are very bright and colorful. Second, they are animation. Sometimes the images fade out and appear; sometimes they go up with their reflection going down. That’s why I always pay attention to them (Another reason I’d like to watch them is because it cost me plenty of time to make this flash file lol).
Inconography/Imagery
The background is constituted by six paintings of UPenn campus. If the main purpose of this site is to show images, it is a pretty good design. But if this site wants people to concentrate on its text, these images may be somewhat distraction. Personally speaking, I’d like to put only one image with light color as background.
In original design, each sub page has decoration pictures. Considering the extremely colorful background, I deleted all the unnecessary ones, only left two icons. Both of them are in the Founder introduction sub link. One is the founder’s picture, the other is an envelope icon for contact. I think they are quite easy to understand.
Color Palette
This site includes almost all the colors I can tell, and 90% of them are in the background images, including black, white, blue, red, orange, green, purple and yellow.
These colors, as a whole, are used to emphasize the main parts of this site. For example, the part above the glass (without reflection) is the core, which includes menu bar and text area, while below is decoration. I think the reason for choosing these colors is to attract people’s attention. When people staring at part of an image, they may wonder what the other parts look like. When the image moving up, they get an answer, just like watching a movie.
Site Focus
I think the purpose of this site is to attract customers to invest and provide consultations. It doesn’t allow people to search but provides a special permission for its customers. In the Login page under the main link “Investment”, people have the right to login and view some documents only if they are the customer of Incline Capital. For security aspect, I think it is the most useful part of this site.
Generally speaking, I think the object of this site is clear and the design idea (three dimensional looking) is creative. The improvement I would make is to change the background images such as reduce the number of color and simplify the animation, in order to let people easier to read the text.
