Ruggeri In The Making

Hello, I am fairly new here but, like all, we seek the critics eye to provide excellence.

I am in the process of creating a website for a client. His main idea was for logo/header to be clean, not alot of colors and a classic color scheme, basically containing red and white. Otherwise all was okay for me to play with.

Please do tell what you think. Thank you.

VIEW LOGO

not bad, but it looks like a header for a website - in other words too complicated for a logo. I don't think it can be used in print, though it would do for a website.

Logo/Header only pertains to the website as there will be no print itself. It is used as the header itself. My mistake for mentioning logo. Thank you.

I like it, but I can't picture how the rest of the website will look...please do keep us updated with your progress.

Just one thing....the large R kinda bothers me, i feel like it unbalances the piece, a little to heavy on the left

also...that is one loooong domain name...

I have to be honest; personally I'd rethink a few things:

There's a bit of dead space between the inside of the "R" and the last "t" on the right side which (because it's negative space) gives the design a bit of a picture frame effect in that area. I would add some positive space elements there to counter that.

Also, it seems like the stroke border that’s on the smaller red text is eating up the font you're using. You can barely see the thin leftovers of the strokes that a font artist worked hard to create. The white text with red border is plagued by another negative space issue (i.e. the background is white, so your eye assumes that everything that is white in the design is non-existent). The shadow aids the issue slightly, but it still looks out of place.

As well, the color sort of strikes me as out-dated. I know you wrote that the client wants traditional, but there are many ways to acheive that without using that specific tone. Also, I really don't think that the red-gray gradient was meant to be. In fact, of all of the designs that I've ever seen, I don't think that any of them had a successful, eye-pleasing, color-to-gray gradient unless there was a very large difference in contrast between the two. Sometimes it looks ok, but it almost never looks great.

As a final suggestion, I think the design would benefit from being placed on a dark, or at least different colored, background and maybe playing around with the text a bit more.

Lastly, I should mention that, I'm assuming this is a complete element of the site. I wasn't sure whether the website was the WIP or whether you were going to show the WIP for each portion of it. In either case, I think that there are some useful suggestions above (which you may or may not decide to use, it's up to you)

Good luck with the rest of the project!

Thank you all for your critique. I actually took out the gradient box and changed things up a bit. And well, finished the site by talking to client on phone and 900 trials later, this is what he wanted and took it.

View Screenshot

Once again, thank you all. Have another page to create tomorrow. So Once I get a feel for it and agree with myself for a half way decent look maybe I show to you all?