N.Design Studio

If there’s one design-related skill that I wish I was much more proficient in, it would have to be illustration. Oh sure, I can fire up Illustrator or Freehand and put together a couple of vectors, and I’ve done fair share of sketching in notebooks, but there’s a knack there that I just don’t have. As such, I’m both incredibly jealous and incredibly in awe of someone who really and truly knows their stuff. Which brings me to Nick La and his recent redesign of N.Design Studio, which serves as his blog and design portfolio.

When done right, illustrations can add a nice organic touch to a website design/layout, and that is precisely the case with La’s site. As you travel through the site, you’ll see bright, richly detailed illustrations with a decided Asian bent to them, lending the site both an organic and an exotic look and feel.

But the attention to detail doesn’t end with the illustrations. It continues on through the playful typography in the headers, the tiny icons used for rollover effects in the main menu, and the navigational flourishes. However, there are times when there’s so much detail that the design becomes a little overwhelming and cluttered (e.g., the layout of the blog entry comments).

But overall, a very lush and gorgeous design that, as I mentioned before, leaves me both insanely jealous and very much in awe.

Related: Process of Redesigning N.Design