Logo / Website Splash Page Critique Please

[Mohawk70]

It isn't visible in the image ... but the 'ENTER' button text changes to white & the background color changes to a solid blue ( no transparency ) ... when hovered over.

[netmaestro]

Looks very good! The only suggestion I can think of is to put a drop shadow on the pencil.

[Mohawk70]

Looks very good!

Thank you

The only suggestion I can think of is to put a drop shadow on the pencil.

That's an excellent suggestion !

[Mohawk70]

3 quick revisions (this will be my last image post on this thread) , but feel free to post opinions
or choose your favorite of the 4 versions.

Edit #1


Edit # 2


Edit #3

[netmaestro]

This is #2 with a dropshadow added to the pencil:

[IdeasVacuum]

I'd ditch the graph paper.......

[Zach]

Ditch the graphs or make them a more traditional "dark" blue. Also need better contrast on the pencil tip. shade it to look like wood and those edges you put in might actually be visible.

Right now the pencil tip doesn't look like anything but an out of place cut diamond with a black tip.

[Josh]

Sorry for the hard criticism, but tastes are different. If I where looking for a graphic designer and see such a site, I would say thanks and bye-bye. I have no problems with sites are note perfectly designed, but from a graphic designer I expect a perfect designed site.

Splash page. Who needs that, for what's that? I don't want to press Enter, I want to see the content with calling the site.

[Lord]

Shouldn't the pencil look more like this:
(Sorry, I'm not an artist. Just to imagine)

[Mohawk70]

Ditch the graphs or make them a more traditional "dark" blue. Also need better contrast on the pencil tip. shade it to look like wood and those edges you put in might actually be visible.

Right now the pencil tip doesn't look like anything but an out of place cut diamond with a black tip.

The diamond is actually part of the brand identity used in other products / services ...

[Mohawk70]

Sorry for the hard criticism, but tastes are different. If I where looking for a graphic designer and see such a site, I would say thanks and bye-bye. I have no problems with sites are note perfectly designed, but from a graphic designer I expect a perfect designed site.

Splash page. Who needs that, for what's that? I don't want to press Enter, I want to see the content with calling the site.

The splash page is for allowing the user to choose the option to view the hi-res version of the design gallery instead of forcing it on mobile or other low bandwith connections, and is not the main page of the site.

[Mohawk70]

Thanks everyone ! One can always expect honest, unbiased opinions on topics
like these here on the board. Final design done and approved by the client

@NetMaestro : added a drop shadow

@IdeasVacuum & @Zach : Convinced client to drop the background - my opinion
was that it looked too cluttered and busy to begin with.

Now on to the site redesign ...

[tj1010]

Comparatively speaking it's good, I'm a contractor and see a lot of designs, most god awful and by "professionals". Then again visuals mean nothing if you want to build a community or get traffic, you can have a world class designer do a site for you, but without exclusive or trendy content for whatever the subject, it's just something you pay for with time and money...

[Zach]

I would look into alternative means to identify whether or not the user is on a mobile platform, and then do an automatic redirect based on that..

i.e when I'm on my phone, my bank will direct me to a mobile site even if I input the www URL for the main site. I'm actually going to look into this myself for my own site, so I have a mobile version which fits better on phone screens and perhaps serves the PDFs directly instead of a zip file.

[Mohawk70]

I would look into alternative means to identify whether or not the user is on a mobile platform, and then do an automatic redirect based on that..

I plan on using a responsive design on the revised site, using CSS3 media queries. What I posted was just a quick mockup solely for visual purposes. No need for a redirect at all that way. Thanks anyhow.