Lushai

I have to be honest I’m an online shop-a-holic but I don’t just buy any old thing. I’m an animal of habit and I buy the things I love; mainly sneakers, books, vinyl (the spinning record type) and t-shirts. Like most people, once I cotton onto a good thing, I can’t get enough so I tend to frequent Pick your shoes, Fishpond, Juno and the mighty Threadless.

Now out of all of these, Threadless is the rare needle in a hay stack that I LOVE. Their whole site reeks of visual design beauty and interaction mastery and for me that means MAGIC. For visual design, look at their minimal colour palatte that lets the content speak out. Tones of blue with a touch of green provide a canvas that doesn’t fight with the content but frame it solidly.

The generous use of white space and typographic variation make the site sing from a graphic design point of view. Amazingly with the fairly large range of type faces on each page (sometimes up to 7 including main navigation items) the site still holds it together. The tight grid structure does it’s job, containing the
large variety of imagery and type into a cohesive pattern. Overall, visually, the site just works!

So what makes Threadless stand out? There are plenty of nice looking shopping sites. Think the Aloha shirt shop or Karmaloop both nicely all round.

…next week – Part 2

The difference is Threadless really get social media, their whole model is based around community collaboration.

More about the interaction design and social media lessons from Threadless next week…

• 1 Comment »
• Posted in Thoughts & Rants