colly.com

Simon Collison is a designer, speaker, author and conference organiser from Nottingham. His design work on the site for the New Adventures Conferene and his own personal site have long been the showcases I use as examples during my design sessions.

colly.com/v4

This website must be one of my most favourite websites of all times. This website is a masterpiece: the text is carefully crafted in a nicely British gentlemanly manner. The typesetting and colour scheme perfectly in tune creating a the sense of a wonderful, old-fashioned printed book, like an encyclopedia perhaps.

This is the homepage from 2003-2018 ~ what a beauty!! You should definitely have a look: colly.com/v4

Luckily it was so popular and admired that Simon kept it online ~ though that might not have been the case had it not been for all the love he got when he posted this on Twitter before launching his site’s redesign:

This v4 redesign launched EIGHT years ago, and will soon be gone, in favour of something satisfyingly boring and infinitely better at representing me and what I care about. Related: even building a boring site takes MONTHS nowadays.

Simon Collison, 5/4/2018

Sparking many likes and prompting quite a few replies, like this one:

Don’t make that masterpiece go away. We have so little left of what was glorious.

Jeffrey Zeldman, 5/4/2018

colly.com

The current version of the website is another lovely example of design mastery, here’s a screenshot of Simon’s CV, taken 6/3/2024. If you’re looking for inspiration of how to put your CV online, this makes for lovely viewing: colly.com

New Adventures Conference

This annual conference ran in January for 3 years (2011-13) and had a final run in 2019 and 2020. The conference brought together creditves from different areas whose talks were thought-provocing, fun and inspiring ~ a highlight and a perfect start to the year. The website presented all info in the most wonderful design.

It will be worth your time to go to the site: newadventuresconf.com. Scroll down to check out the conference sites via the year links, plenty of inspiration ツ I attended the conference and felt so inspired that I followed the lead of the designs to write up my notes, have a look (links for each are located in the top strip).