Andrew Bradshaw

This is the personal website for Texas designer Andrew Bradshaw, who is creative director for Church Plant Media. He creates elegant, simple designs that are mostly for churches or other religious establishments. This is not a subject that appeals to me at all, but the designs are all very modern and sophisticated and since I'm looking at this from a design point of view I'll try not to let my (non-existent) religious views affect my judgement. Haha.
His personal website is a great example of his work in itself, being clean and sophisticated with a clear layout that draws the user in.

The header uses a dark brown textured background that looks great against the muted shades used in the rest of the design. I really like the use of type in the header as well; I have always been a fan of typography and the contrast of the capitalized serif font against the lowercase sans-serif really appeals to me. The use of colour in the word 'design' helps it to stand out amongst the earthy brown.

The navigation for this website is rather nice, with creative use of hover effects. When the user hovers over the different links they are underlined by a block of colour. There is also differentiation between the portfolio links and the personal links, which are faded out slightly. However, I'm not sure the word 'portfolio' is really necessary as it's quite clear that this is what the links are for and it just looks quite obtrusive.

The use of imagery on the main page is attractive, giving the user a quick view of what the designer's work is like. He has also added faint drop shadows, giving the illusion of 3D and depth.

An element of this website that bugs me a bit is the text 'Web. Simple.' as to me it looks quite irrelevant to the design. It has been connected to the rest of the design by matching the font colour with that of the word 'design' in the header, but the actual font seems out of place. The hand-written style is on-trend in web design at the moment, but here, mixed in with the other various font styles, I think it is a bit too much. I myself would not use this amount of different fonts in a design. However, looking at the rest of the design and the other featured in his portfolio, the diesgner clearly has a solid grasp of typography and how it should be used. This can be seen in the company website, Church Plant Media.

Overall this designer has a nice style, creating modern sophistacted designs with a personal edge. The use of textures throughout his portfolio is noticeable, and this is clearly something he is fond of. The use of type is also significant, an is mostly used very well.