Exploding Dog

Intended Audience:

• Anyone who wants to send the artist, Sam Brown, a title, and have him draw a picture from the title and post it on his website.
• Anyone who enjoys off-beat artwork featuring robots, dogs, and empty space-like landscapes.
• Anyone shopping for t-shirts, books, or other items featuring that artwork.
• I think this site probably gets a lot of traffic from users that just happened to stumble across it, or through word of mouth (although I just learned that his drawings were featured in Wired a while back, so maybe it's more well-known than I thought).
  

Usefulness of Content:

• The content probably not useful in the larger sense of being 'necessary,' but it is a very colorful site that is good for cheering you up, making you laugh, or killing some time.
• If you are looking for a unique and cool gift for someone, this would also be a useful site.

Consistency of Design:

• The artwork pages are all very consistent; when you click on a title, the image comes up with the title of the piece above it, a link to order exploding dog merchandise below, and the exploding dog logo.
• The other pages, like the store and the "everything else" link are all pretty simple and consistent, too. Even though they are much more dense and have less white space than the main page, the exploding dog logo stays constant, and the font of the rest of the text remains the same.
• Overall, with the exception of the addition of a few more links in the sidebar on the left, this site has not changed its design very much since I first started reading it a few years ago.

Ease of Navigation:

• Very easy. Links to pictures are on the right, arranged by date and title, and the few other links are on the left. It might be confusing to some people that all the text is either black or gray (denoting a link that's been selected), but everything that's a link is consistently underlined.
• The search feature is nice and clear, though it is not immediately obvious that the archives are found under "everything else." What's more, the "everything else" link (on my monitor and browser, at least) is below the jump, though if you're scrolling down to see more than a couple of days' worth of pictures, you'll see it easily.
• Finally, it is great that the exploding dog logo underneath each picture links back to the homepage, so you can just click on the title you want to see, scroll down the picture, and go back to the homepage for another title.