The one-page design is an innovatively interactive and exciting new way to design websites. With the power of CSS and Javascript, the future possibilities of attention-grabbing styles, animations, and responsive web effects are endless as they continue to grow and expand alongside technology. Intended to showcase one main idea, one-page websites declutter the site of UI aspects and focuses on the most important information of a topic. These landing pages offer a linear navigation flow with a beginning, middle, and end, a long scrolling layout, with ideally no navigation to another window or page. This adds a continuous fluid experience for the viewer.
As new devices surface, with smaller screens like the Apple watch or Fitbit, or larger screens, like the AppleTV, responsive web design has intensely entered, allowing viewers to visit successfully scaled versions of desktop spaces. If successful in responsive actions, a combination of fluid and adaptive properties optimizes a one-page site to be viewed, read, and interacted with on any screen size, while still looking aesthetically pleasing.
Calmaria
This one-page site functions as a quick advertisement for the phone app, Calmaria. While the app itself was created for breathing techniques and practices, the general audience could include a variety of potential consumers, from athletes, those suffering from anxiety, those suffering from stress, those who like to meditate, or those just needing to take a break. The design approach takes on a minimal style with high contrast, white and black, background colors, sans-serif font, and much white space. The style and mood portray a tech-like style through the lack of color, however the mood seems ironically calm with the amount of blankness. The only pop of color is the phone screen with the app open. In coding structure, the layout contains mainly div boxes and sections to display content. A nice key visual element included on this page is the app screen itself and overlapping images of photos between sections. In a crisp, clear image of a phone at the top, animation draws attention to the screen and creates movement on the stiff page. White space is used generously down and across the page, probably to focus attention on text and images, but on a desktop size, the white space and positioning of paragraphs seems slightly too spacious in my taste. Specifically, the design looks like it was initially built for the smaller phone screen size. When resizing the browser window, the elements and text align much better, centering the larger paragraphs, on a smaller screen size, whereas on a desktop screen, larger paragraphs stick to the left side. That being said, the white space reflects the concepts of clarity and calmness, which is what the app represents, making this design considerably successful. Through inspection, the entire page seems to be made up of only div blocks, containers, and sections, no use of grids or columns or organization.
Dovetail –> Afterpay
This amazingly designed one-page expresses many animations and a light, airy mood within an infographic story depicting the history of Afterpay, a new payment method that allows people to purchase something and pay in increment payments. The elements themselves seem flat, vector-like, but with gradients, color, and animation, content lift from the page and creates dimension. The site probably attracts an audience invested in Afterpay, startup businesses, potential consumers, or designers in general due to the great functional design of the site. The color scheme ranges all shades/hues of the topical colors and creates heavy and light contrast tones. Animation flows down the page as you scroll in every section including a navigation bar that appears on the left panel. Along with bright attention-grabbing colors, font and a geometric style dominate the whole site, dividing sections and producing great sections. The use of extremely large font is definitely an attention grabber. This site is extremely successful through presentation as well as responsive web design. The smaller screen size does not interfere with any animations and sizing and produces a dropdown menu alternative to the desktop bar. For a product that deals with money/payment, a worldly concept that comes with speculation, the designer created a rather fun, lighthearted site to create ease and comfort with the brand/company/product. However, I will add that this is a much more complex one page site than most simple one pagers. Unless the reader is fully invested and following the story, the amount of information is extensive and the page itself is rather long.
MIRANDA
This ‘temporary’ website is rather simple and minimal in style, but it was also created through the means of Webflow and serves as a personal one-page portfolio that represents the designer, Niccolo Miranda, and his works. While this landing page may be short, the site also contains other one-page sites with amazing interactive abilities by the designer. The key visual elements include interactive abilities, a soft contrasting greyscale color scheme, with a pop of yellow, and special focus and utilization of font as the main design approach. The designer actually utilized three different fonts across the board, including sans-serif, serif, and decorative. The most interesting part of this site involves the hover interaction over the “Project List” that reveals images related to the work of that respective topic. The interaction and responsive sizing really make this site successful, although in a smaller screen size, there is much white space at the bottom of the screen. Probably fixable. When it comes to designer approach, I find that many designers prefer a simple, minimal style overall that can feature and highlight their actual work, like this one. Through inspection, you can see how the elements are spaced out accordingly and the float position is set many times to organize content. Unfortunately, because the links take you to another window, I would really consider this portfolio to be just a simple landing page. That being said, the one page sites this designer has created are extremely technical and complex one page designs.