Due to the continuously increasing amount of talented web designers, it seems to become more and more difficult to create a website which is truly unique and one that stands out from the crowd in a certain way.

One succeeded example definitely is the third revision of the portfolio website of creative professional Maximilian Bartel also known as indiqo.media which combines an appealing and creative visual concept with clean and accessible source code in a seriously remarkable manner. Influenced by various different styles, personal preferences and the intention to create something fresh and innovative, the design itself is an approach to reflect the taste and personality of the designer rather than an attempt to please everybody.

Exactly this attitude was one of the most important aspects from the start, because it offered enough creative freedom to realize a project like this and truth be told, a portfolio website is the perfect place to express creativity.

The entire site utilizes a smooth and deeply colored heaven theme fading from dark to light from the top combined with various illustrations of the designer interacting with a half moon. In general, it’s a quite playful and inviting design with many details not even visible at first sight or did you notice that the eyes of the twitter bird at the bottom twinkle frequently or that the consistency of the clouds is fluid? These are just a few samples of the massive attention to details everywhere just waiting to be discovered and probably make the difference to many other comparable websites.

While the most important aspect for the visible part of the website unmistakably was creativity, the technical side obtained an entirely different priority. It seems like it was important to find a solution which offered a solid, fast and powerful back end with the ability for maximum control regarding the output in order to ensure a clean and W3C valid source code later on. Max says “Many content management systems have been evaluated and failed, but in the end only one was qualified for this task and met all of the requirements – ExpressionEngine“. The result likely speaks for itself and so the current source code is written in table-less, valid strict XHTML which is probably the most difficult W3C standard to meet these days. Moreover it’s worth mentioning that even though the design itself is very complex, it seems to be consequently optimized for the vast majority of browsers and so works exceptionally well in almost all of them according to a compatibility test made with Litmus App.

Compared with the first two releases of the indiqo website, the usability has been improved significantly by adding a site map at the bottom and a search within the right column of any page. In addition, several essential social media elements such as the latest twitter messages, a blog, an rss feed, a newsletter form and a social bookmark widget have been added or introduced in a beautiful way just following a trend set by many other websites before already. Even though these features are not new, it’s still interesting to see how they have been implemented here.

All in all, this website is a GREAT example of how extraordinary ideas, principles of usability, and technical expertise can be combined to produce something that really stands out from the rest. After all, this is the “World Wide Web”, you have an endless amount of competition, most of which can throw a site together in a matter of minutes and call themselves a web designer. It takes hard work and dedication (as well as a bit of natural talent) to create the masterpieces that Maximilian has been generating lately..

And did I mention he’s a really nice guy? So nice that after a five minute conversation I just felt compelled to write this article about him and his new website. Whether your looking for inspiration, a designer for your next project, or just someone that really knows design, then Maximilian is the man you need to get in touch with.

All the best Max!

- FrooWeb Admin

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