Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
20 More Inspiring Website Footer Designs
Following on from our previous blog post ‘10 inspiring website footer designs’ I seemed to see more outstanding footer designs everywhere. I have managed to find another 20 to share with you!
TNT Pixel (Thanks Dan Hauk for pointing this one out!)
What do you think about the footers featured? I have to admit I particularly like the Blup and Uforia footers. Have you spotted any outstanding website footers that should be added to the list?
Tags: footers, Graphic Design, inspiration, Web Design
Posted in Design Inspiration, Web Design | 2 Comments »
10 Inspiring Website Footer Designs
So you are working on your latest online masterpiece and as you’re adding the final touches you lean back and notice the typography is looking smooth and the few simple images you have used are fitting in well. Everything above the waist is near to perfection, however you’ve forgotten one thing …. your footer.
I’ve recently decided that as a designer I neglect that all important base of the site - the footer. When I leave the house I pay as much attention to what I am donning on my feet as well as my shoulders so why when it comes to designing a web site don’t I pay as much attention to the footer?
Here are some jaw dropping and inspiring website footers:
I love how Simple Art uses the footer to portray the office wall including a window. It leaves me with the usual “why can’t I think of something like that?!”
Having a map as your footer?! Great idea and excellently executed in the Banjax site.
Matt Mullenweg has a fantastic header and it’s nice to see that some of those gorgeous illustrations are also applied to the footer. It doesn’t take much, just a little something to make your footer not feel left out.
Barbed wire - something different and fits in well with the overall style of the Zagreb Fever site (this image doesn’t do it justice you need to see the site to appreciate it!).
So simple and not overwhelming, the footer in the Komodo Media site just looks well thought out.
I really like chunky thick footers, like this one on the Inspiredology site. This teamed up with textures and distress creates a great looking footer.
The simple waves on the Popstalin site just make the footer come alive.
I love Hicks Design footer, but is this beautiful illustration wasted on the footer?
The Mochiads footer is below ground level - drawing it into the site.
Once again the Artypapers footer is based below ground. The grass illustrations shows that there are many ways to create this popular below ground look.
All of these footers have made me think I need to show my websites footers more love in the design process. But what do you think? Are you another designer who uses the obligatory bar or line for a footer and does this inspire you to do something different? Or do you think it can be a little overwhelming if you utilise this area as well as every other part of the site?
Tags: Design Inspiration, Footer Design
Posted in Design Inspiration, Web Design | 13 Comments »
How many Website Design companies??!
Now I am not normally one to pass judgement on other people and other companies, but today I received a flyer through my letterbox from a startup website design company based in my area. Whenever I see a new company in our industry the first thing I do is log on to their website and have a look at their design portfolio and list of clients.
Whilst their website was nothing hideous, it did feature the usual cliched stock images of women using laptops (I am not sure why they are always using laptops? Do women not use desktop computers?). Alarm bells rang when the rather small portfolio included a website which showcased the musical talents of someone by the same name as the director of the web design company. It was then that I thought ‘Oh no, another one’.
We seem to be overrun (in the South Devon area at least) by hundreds of people claiming to be web designers and graphic designers who offer their services at ridiculous prices and who offer such a wide range of services they could never be a specialist.
Similarly, I came across a website advertising the services of a Torquay based web design company which also sent alarm bells ringing when I read their list of services as follows:
- Website design
- Photography
- Logo design
- Setting up Internet Connections
- Setting up printers
- Networking
- Setting Up Ebay / Facebook / MySpace accounts
…and the list goes on. The most worrying thing about the above company is their price list. They are currently advertising logo design from between £45 and £60 (although this is free when you order a web design package!). You can also take advantage of their ’Free Home Page Trial’ in which you can have the home page of your website designed with no obligation to buy! Now, as I say, I am not normally one to comment on how other people run their companies, but this is surely pricing themselves out of the market (not to mention making it harder for the rest of us).
The worst thing about the companies I have mentioned is the quality of work produced. A quick check against the WC3 Validator reported over 103 errors on the home page alone (and 124 errors on the first example I mentioned). This combined with dead links, links which open in a new window for no reason, slow download speeds and table based layouts all show the quality of workmanship is simply not there.
The scary thing is that a quick Google search showed there are many more companies offering the same cheap services.
Reading other blogs it seems that this is something that all designers feel quite passionate about (especially in relation to logo design). I recently read a post by Tara on her Graphic Design Blog in which she tells of an incident in which a company had come to a designer friend of hers after having had their newly designed logo added to there company stationary and to a fleet of vehicles, only to discover that another company (from the same industry as them) already uses that very same logo. It seems that it is only after an incident like this that a client learns the benefit of seeking a skilled and professional designer, rather than trying to save a few pounds and getting it done cheap.
However, not all potential clients have had this experience and it can be frustrating having to explain why our prices are higher than the company down the road who will complete the whole project for a lot less money and throw a free logo design in for good measure!
Don’t get me wrong, there are many talented web designers and programmers in the South Devon area, some of which we have been lucky enough to work with but there seems to be a new web / design company cropping up every day!
We recently wrote a blog post about the funny things clients say and ask for and the general feedback from our readers was that it is our obligation to educate our clients to the reasoning and processes behind our industry. The problem is, businesses are based on money, and it’s very hard to explain to the client the difference between a £45 logo design and the price that would be charged by a professional graphic designer.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Do you feel there are lots of companies in your area letting the industry down? How do you explain to your clients the differences between the service you offer compared to a much cheaper company? Or are you a designer / company who offers cheap services and feels you have a valid reason for this?
More articles on this subject:
Why logo design does not cost $5.00 - By Jacob at Just Creative Design
What’s your logo worth? - By David Airey
6 Reasons Why a Logo Should Cost More than your Lunch - By Tara at Graphic Design Blog
Posted in Freelancing, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Web Design | 13 Comments »
When is it the right time to re-design your website?
After reading David Aireys blog post ‘Why are designers never 100% satisfied?’ we got thinking about our own online presence and whether it was still saying and doing what we wanted it to. The current version of the Eightyone Design website is now about 18 months old and I wonder whether it is time for a rethink.
The branding and visual style of the site is still in keeping with our offline branding (stationary, business cards, etc) so we are not thinking about re-branding, but a lot has changed over the last 18 months so when it is time for a website re-design?
When we designed and built the flash based Eightyone Design website, its purpose was to be a very simple, basic site that would showcase some of our portfolio. We wanted to keep it simple so opted to have four sections to the site:
- Home Page - with a brief overview of who we were and what we did.
- News Page - to feature small news stories.
- Portfolio Page - a simple image viewer showcasing some of our portfolio.
- Contact Us Page - for our contact details and a email contact form.
We chose to build the above sections into a small and simple flash based website so we were able to animate and add some depth to the simple content. The only exception was the news page which used php to pull an RSS feed onto a html page in order for google to better rank the content.
Then came the Search Engine Optimisaton. With the site being completely built using Flash, there was little to no content for Google and the other search engines to rank. We set about building some static HTML pages in order to provide some textual content and also to provide an alternative version of the site to be viewed if the user did not have the Flash player installed.
So this seemed to work OK and we started getting some good page ranking from Google. But now, 18 months on, we are starting to question our current website design.
Since the launch of the Eightyone Design website we have launched our own Graphic Design Blog which has been receiving some good traffic since switching to Wordpress to power our content. The blog is allowing us to break out from the local area in which the majority of our clients are based and potentially expand our target market. I also wonder whether using a Flash based website is the most effective way to showcase our work. There is also the problem of Google v Flash. Also, the current design does not feature much information about Eightyone Design.
Our original thoughts for our online portfolio was that is should be more of a gallery than a website. However, this has caused us to only show visuals of our work without any description on the design process of the projects. In his article ‘Creating The Perfect Portfolio‘, Collis Ta’eed explains the importance of an explanation of a design project:
If you present your portfolio with explanations of what they are looking at, how the work solved the business needs of the client, and any other salient details, the viewer is much more likely to understand the value in your work. Remember that many leads won’
t have a design background, and may not fully appreciate the work or the effect of good design.
This would hint that our current site does not fully explain our services and how a potential client can benefit from them.
So now to my question, When is the right time to re-design your website? And to answer this I am asking for your help.
The Options
As far as we see it, there are currently three options open to us for redesigning the website. The first is to move the blog articles to the home page and make the site more of a blog site with our portfolio accessible through a navigational link. This would offer more content and keywords on the home page of our site and hopefully increase our page ranking for search engines. There are a few Graphic Designers sucessfully marketing themselves in this fashion (David Airey / Just Creative Design / Graphic Design Blog) so maybe this could be the way forward? However, our little blog is by no means as popular and as busy as the blogs I have mentioned (and the ones I haven’t) so would this be a bad idea to place emphasis on the blog rather than our portfolio? There also seems to be many of these sort of blog sites popping up and I wonder if it would cause us to ‘blend in with the crowd’?
The second option would be to use a magazine style Wordpress template that would feature both portfolio items and blog articles on the home page. Themeplayground have posted a list of Magazine themes in their article ‘The Best WordPress Magazine Themes Available’. I particularly like the look of the Mimbo Theme and the Revolution Theme. Using a magazine would give greater prominence to our blog articles than our current design (which currently only features a link through to the blog) and would allow the user to decide what they wanted to see, portfolio examples, info about our company or blog entries. However, my one criticism of magazine style templates is they can be somewhat overwelming with no clear emphasis. I sometimes don’t know where I want to go first.
The third option would be to redesign the site using html rather than flash. This would allow for greater search engine optimisation without changing the current priority of our portfolio over the blog. Again, there are many successful graphic designers using this format to great effect (Truly Ace Design / Tracey Grady / Spoon Graphics). However, the one thing I do feel about our current flash based website design is it does look somewhat different to other sites and does carry through our branding very effectively.
So there is a fourth option. We could carry on using our existing design which seems to have ‘earned it’s keep’ over the past 18 months. We have found many new clients through our website so are we being overly critical of our little flash site? There are many graphic design agency’s using flash based content (Toast Concept / St Lukes / We are Collective) so should we carry on as we are?
Conclusion…sort of?
As with any graphic designers online presence, our website needs to showcase our portfolio in order to appeal to the widest range of clients as possible and I am unsure that the current design does this effectively.
We are looking for thoughts on our current site design and format. What do you like about the site? What do you dislike? Do you think it appeals to potential clients? And also any ideas you have to improve the site.
We will be following this up with another post showing our initial ideas for the redesign based on your comments.
Tags: branding, Web Design
Posted in Web Design, branding | 18 Comments »
Design development for Wakeham Asbestos
Back in February we were approached by Wakeham, a new company in the asbestos industry who offers training and consultancy. The company required a full set of branding as well as brochure and website.
As with every design project, we start at the beginning - the logo. They felt that their industry was particularly male dominated and wanted a logo which was strong and bold yet quite simple. After an initial discussion we concluded that the logo could center around these themes:
- Utilise the “W” of the company name
- Focus on the “A” in the company name highlighting Asbestos
- Use the three strands of the business (training, management and surveying)
- Focus on some imagery or representation of asbestos
Other than requiring a strong, bold logo, Wakeham didn’t have any other specific requirements in mind. The logo was to be used online as well as brochures, stationary, invoices etc, therefore it had to work on all types of media.
Stage 1 - Sketching
We started by utilising the “W” of the company name combining it with shapes representative of the three strands of the business (training, management and surveying). A lot of time was spent sketching “W” type shapes. We wanted the logo to look contemporary as our research had shown that competitor logos were very dated, we therefore needed something different, something fresh and alive. However, we were also aware that the logo had to appeal to a B2B market as well as B2C so therefore had to look somewhat corporate.
Once again we combined the three strands of the business concept when focussing on the “A” in the company name. As Wakeham are a consultancy we liked the idea that they can handle all aspects of your project and so developed several umbrella type designs.
It’s easy to get carried away when you are designing and creating a logo and once we looked over the logo’s we decided to present the following concepts:
The client immediately liked one of the logos. They did have a few minor adjustments to the tracking of the text and the corporate blue colour so we experimented with both these aspects.
From the logo the stationary was then developed. This was quite a seamless leap and the logo transfered well to the letterheads, compliment slips and business cards.
We then started work on the brochure, Wakeham supplied all textual content as well as a rough layout. They wanted the brochure to be simple and easy to read and as there was a lot of textual content we decided to break the layout into sections. We ensured the contact information was repeated on the brochure so people could find it without too much trouble.
Wakeham had few minor text adjustments with the brochure, but overall they were happy with the design and the corporate branding that was emerging.
Using the style of the brochure we created a simple, clean website. Again the contact information is repeated on every page, allowing users to get in contact easily.
This was a great project as the client had some initial guidelines and ideas and knew a lot about their market and who they were trying to target. However, they also gave us enough free rein to explore other possibilities and ideas.
So what does everyone think? Did Wakeham Asbestos choose the right branding? We would love to hear your thoughts.
Tags: branding, brochure design, Graphic Design, identity, Logo Design, Web Design
Posted in Graphic Design, Logo Design, Portfolio, Web Design, branding | 11 Comments »