Posts Tagged ‘branding’
eightyone design christmas card designs
Tis the season! Yes it’s that special time of year again where vector snowflakes, christmas trees and stockings are in abundance in the design world! There’s no escape from the festive look and by now it feels like they have been around for too long (especially since Christmas seems to start in September)!
We thought we’d share our Christmas card design for this year with you and get your thoughts.
We want our Christmas card to be a reminder of us and therefore be quite strongly branded. We always have our contact details on the reverse and our logo repeated a couple of times.
Last years card was really quite simple as we wanted to really push the logo. We went with a silver snowflaked logo on white with our company green in the centre to add some spark to the card.
This year we have gone for a similar design, however we didn’t want to utilise the logo as the main focus. We therefore experimented with several design concepts incorporating our branding with a Christmas element - we tried everything from snow men to christmas puddings! We finally decided on this bauble design, which we feel does liken itself to our logo (if you turn your head counter clockwise - the smaller bauble the top of the eight and the bigger logo the bottom?).
We explored several colour combinations but felt that the ligher silver colour followed on well from last year and had a stronger ‘christmassy’ feel.
The inside of the card was left white as we felt the strong green background may be a little too overpowering with the silver front. We inserted our logo with “Merry Christmas” above and below the logo we replaced “eightyone” with “everyone”.
The back of the card holds our contact details and logo repeated again.
Overall we are really please with the card and think that it reflects our branding and style as well as looking ‘Christmassy’!
Do you like the card? Did we go with the right colour choice or do you prefer one of the other options?
Tags: branding, christmas card, Graphic Design, logo
Posted in Colour, Graphic Design, Logo Design, branding | 5 Comments »
Web Design Case Study - www.growwithit.org
We love playing with textures and layering here at Eightyone Design, so when Exeter based IT Company Switch Systems called us for a website visual with an underground / above ground feel we jumped with joy at the opportunity to create such an unusual site. In this article we discuss the website design visual and the elements used to create www.growwithit.org.
The campaign that Switch Systems developed was called Grow With IT and they wanted a website to reflect the idea of natural growth. We loved the idea of using soil textures for the content section of the site with the bottom of the header being at eye level so you can see the roots of the grass and plants right up to the elements above ground and the sky.
The campaign was aimed at local businesses so we created a sign post which was routed into the ground pointing to Exeter.
As I mentioned, the site was created to promote natural and organic growth so we created a server actually growing from the ground emerging from it’s leaves.
We experimented with several different skies as we wanted the sky to be bright but not too over powering as we wanted the below ground level to be the focal point.
Arista was used as we wanted a contemporary yet fun and bubbly font.
The earth colour palette almost looks retro with the cream text, but we felt this worked really well with the natural tone of the website design.
We are very pleased with the site, and believe it fulfills the brief adding a new spin on the usual style of IT Consultancy websites. The website design visual was handed over to the guys at Switch Systems who have done a great job of building the final website.
What do you think of the grow With IT website? What are your thoughts on the server growing from the ground? Do you think it works? Have you ever been given a project brief that you are particularly excited to start?
Tags: branding, Portfolio, Web Design
Posted in Portfolio, Web Design | 4 Comments »
Design and Development of The VW Camper Van Blog Website and Logo Design
As you are probably well aware over here at eightyone design we have a huge passion for VW campervans. We have written a couple of articles on them (When should a graphic designer stop designing? and VW campervan logo designs) and love to tinker with our own VW T25 Camper Van. We had been thinking of creating a blog solely dedicated to our hobby enabling us to write endless articles about various events we attend, camping, plans for our van as well as featuring other peoples vehicles. We finally launched www.vwcampervanblog.com last month and we are really pleased with the overall look as well as how it has been received by the VW Community. In this article we outline the design process we went through to design the blog and where we drew inspiration from.
Overall Style
We decided upon a vintage / retro theme as the blog would feature all different vans from 1950’s and 1960’s splitties through 1970’s Bay Window Vans and also the more modern VW camper vans.
Logo Design
We started at the beginning - with the logo design. Knowing we were after a retro feel we hit the usual inspiration hot spots such as Flickr. We found some great examples of vintage and retro drinks signs aswell as petrol / oil signs which we really liiked and seemed to suit the subject matter really well.
There are some great Flickr Groups on this subject:
Vintage Soft Drink Signs
Vintage Texaco
Vintage Soda Labels
Taking inspiration from the above logos we developed several different logo design concepts in similar styles but decided on the logo below. Several different colours optons were played around with but we both felt it worked best with cream and blue as it felt retro yet clean and crisp.
Website Design
We found an excellent blog post over at Smashing Magazine featuring a range of retro websites. There was certainly plenty to get us inspired! Many of the interiors of campervans feature vintage fabric patterns and we knew we wanted to utilise this in the design.
We also were itching to encorporate textures in the website design to create a layered effect giving the design some depth. We love the canvas material we found and felt it added to the vintage upholstery feel we were trying to acheive.
For the other elements on the page we wanted a distressed look as though they were printed on the canvas. This was achieved using several different layers combined with blending modes.
We liked the idea of using Polaroid’s to display the first image of the post to further the personal feel of the site and make images look a little more retro.
Overall we are really pleased with the blog design and feel that it has a simple vintage style which is reminisent of the VW Camper Vans and the era from which they came. It was both fun and challenging to design for ourself without having any client input. It also allowed us to explore some techniques and styles which we have not yet been able to use on client projects.
So what do you think? Do you like the overall look of the blog? Do you like vintage / retro style design? Or do you prefer something a bit more clean and simple?
Tags: blog, branding, Logo Design, textures, vw, website design
Posted in Blogging, Design Inspiration, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Personal Projects, Web Design, branding | 2 Comments »
Rip Curl Boardmasters Festival - Poster Designs
We spent a very wet weekend at the annual Ripcurl Boardmasters Festival held in Newquay, Cornwall. The Boardmasters event celebrates surf, skate and music with the Vans Skate competition, the Ripcurl Surf competition and the Unleashed Music Festival.
We were wondering through Newquay and found a Ripcurl shop sporting all the usual surf gear as well as all the previous posters promoting the Festival. It is interesting to see how the event posters have evolved over time.
As you can see the posters were originally very photo driven and have evolved over time to incorporate heavy use of vector graphics. It’s interesting to see that they never seem to use the same logo design, but each years logo utilises the use of the wings and blocky fonts. The posters all seem similar in style - they all look very distressed and rough and a lot of attention is given to the typography. However,as each year goes on, they have shifted the focus from surf and skate to music - the posters have to reflect the evolution of the festival.
There are other Ripcurl events held internationally and I have popped a couple of posters below, I love the use of the clean lines and illustrations for the female events.
So what do you think of these poster designs? Over used vectors and destroyed look that you’ve seen too many times before? Or nice sense of style and branding?
Tags: branding, Graphic Design, poster design
Posted in Graphic Design, branding | 4 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 »