My second critique is the well-known Smashing Magazine (http://smashingmagazine.com/). It’s a blog targeted at designers and brings resources such as news, tutorials, tips and tricks, interesting designs, inspiration, resources and much more.
The design itself is extremely clean, with no textures used at all. It’s a two-column layout with a wider-than-usual sidebar on the right, which is host to an extremely visible RSS icon, as well as a number of subscribers to show their influence. Below that, there’s a search box, followed by what I think is way too many sponsorship ads. The typography is well done, using sans-serif fonts exclusively and adequate line height to promote easy readability.
There’s a twitter link at the bottom of the sidebar with no live feed, so social networking isn’t a real goal for Smashing Magazine, which makes sense since their goal is not to gain prominence in the world since: a) they’re already quite well-known and b) they are not trying to promote themselves for the sake of employment etc. Thus, the only social aspect of the site is by comments and the forum. The comments are useless most of the time, with quite a few posts just being spam. However, the forum seems to be well-moderated and active, providing a space where designers can communicate.
The colour scheme predominately focuses on orange/red hues, which are pleasing and effectively as highlight colours.
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