It's very rare that I am "impressed" by a web site's style and layout. This is amplified in the blog genre of web sites where everyone uses 1 of 3 basic layouts infused with different colors and fonts to "personalize it" (says me, throwing rocks from my glass web site; but hey, I never claimed to be impressed by my own site).
The reason for this is probably the same reason I never really feel that impressed by different orchestras. I mean, I know it's good. I enjoy going to the orchestra. I work across the street from The Cleveland Orchestra and have made frequent visits (not so much recently, but have in the past). I've always enjoyed it. However, I can't really tell the difference between them and, say, any other orchestra that falls into the top 1000 orchestral units in the world. I just know that I cannot appreciate it as much as someone who has a much more intimate knowledge. In the same vein, I can rarely tell you if one web site's style and layout is better than another's. 23% of them occupy the normal area under the curve with 71% of them being blatant crap. Another 5% are those that I can somewhat identify as being definitively better than the norm.
That leaves the 1% of sites like subtraction.com. For some reason, I am really taken aback by the site. It's so simplistic in design but so rich in all of the nuances. I could not tell you with exactness what makes it good, but everything just seems to work with everything else; and everything seems to be where it is supposed to be and where you would expect it to be in some kind of prescient way. And, I really dig the simple black/white color scheme with strong orange contrasting mouse focus highlights.
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