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It became almost an unofficial rule in web design that horisontal scrolling in websites is bad.
I only partially agree - it’s bad if users have to scroll both vertically and horisontally, but if you manage to eliminate vertical scrolling, leaving only one horisontal one, you can achieve some very interesting unusual layouts and effects.
Here’s the First Part of my Unusual websites series - Horisontal designs:
My first site on the list is Blue Vertigo. Most of the horisontal layouts that I found would still show an occasional vertical scrolling if my browser is resized accordingly. But this one features a top image that’s overlapped with the middle content and reveals as much of the top image as fits the browser window. Blue Vertigo is an amazing site that hosts hundreds of useful design collection from stock photography to fonts to colours. And the designers came up with a very clever idea to showcase the links horisontally instead.
This site belongs to a Russian web design guru Dmitry Kirsanov. He published a web design book that was sought after by all Russian speaking designers back in 1995, beginning of the WWW. And as usual, the style of his web design studio stands out in the crowd with beautiful colour scheme, typography and layout.
This is a very cleverly designed site from CSS Zen Garden, called “Radio Zen”. It features a Retro look (another unusual for websites style that I’ll be featuring in my series) with a a very neat effect of a horisontally scrolling handle on the radio at the top.
Here is another horisontal design from CSS Zen Garden, called Gruener Entwurf. I like how each section looks like a new page. The only thing I don’t like about the layout is that it still shows a vertical scrollbar. The designer should’ve either center aligned the main content or better raised it to the very top, eliminating the unnecessary vertical scrolling.
I couldn’t find some of my other bookmarked horisonal websites, so to add more to this collection, I searched for more horisontal sites with Google and found this one - The Horizontal Way, which turned to be a site with a collection of horisontal site designs. It actually included some of the sites above as well. So feel free to browse their site to find more inspirational website designs. Most of them I found to be flash based, while I’m looking for more XHTML/CSS based designs.
I’m planning on adding more to this collection, so if you know some other sites, please tell about them in your comments.
check out http://www.vault49.com
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Heidi, thanks for the link - what a beautiful site.
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Try these portfolios: http://www.integendeel.nl and http://www.noondesign.nl
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this site is quite cool, loads slow though http://www.pixalism.co.uk
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