Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Here’s a few inspiring websites (and other things) I’ve encountered recently:

1. Subtraction: monochrome, gridded, super-clean site. I keep coming back to this one when I’m thinking about a new design.
2. Verbalized: perfect use of graphic elements and typography to create a visually appealing design without ever distracting the user from the content
3. DJ:nod: a great combination of organic illustration and clean, usable grid design, with a subtle use of Flash
4. The Intelligent Labor website isn’t anything special, but I’ve noticed their trucks driving around Cambridge and admired the bold, steampunky-yet-current style on the vehicles.
5. Winter in Boston — Jesse and I have been enjoying going on some photo-taking walks. Winter scenes make me want to do monochrome design!

This blog — and my main site — have a new look! I’ve been working on this design for what seems like forever (actually it’s a few months, but that’s still quite some time) and I’m very excited to finally launch it — let me know what you think!

A few sites I’ve launched recently:

• MyIGEA is a restaurant review site aimed at food-allergy sufferers; when you sign up, you list the allergies that you (or a friend/family member) have, and the site generates a list of restaurants that other users with the same allergy rated highly. I did all the back-end coding for this (it’s another Tensegrity project and I worked with one of their designers).
  Once I started working on this site I became more attuned to food allergies, and I realized how many people there are that could benefit from a resource like this — so I’m pretty psyched about launching this. It’s still in “alpha”, which means that the features aren’t finalized and there will be some more development, but it’s open to the public and available for you to sign up and start reviewing!
• Pianofarm.net is the new site that I designed for my mom’s piano studio; this is the first static site that I built since discovering the CushyCMS system of updating content, and I’m really impressed with how it was wicked easy both for me to set up and for my mom to use. (Anyone who doesn’t already have a CMS might want to check this out — I can set it up in less than an hour, and you can then easily update your own content, which should save you some time/money.)
• I posted about the initial launch of espressy a few months ago, but in December we launched the second version of the site, with a revised design and category system.