Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’
vwcampervanblog.com featured in Web Designer Magazine
In this months Web Designer Magazine there is an article showcasing ‘50 trendy and inspiring blog designs’. We are very excited to have one of our own designs featured as part of the collection - vwcampervanblog.com.
This fantastic news comes hot on the heals of our double page feature in Images magazine last month for our clothing and t-shirt design work for WBR World Beach Rugby.
The VW Camper Van Blog was created as a personal project enabling us to blog about our second favourite passion. In the article, it features alongside some great blogs, many of which we regularly read such as Spoon Graphics, Veerle’s Blog and Smashing Magazine.
There are some really well designed blogs featured such as Dawg House Design Studio, Style 4 You, MA.TT and Jeff Sarmiento so if you are looking for some blog design inspiration then run out and grab a copy now!
Thanks to Web Designer Magazine for featuring our blog design. Have you been featured in a magazine or on a website for one of your designs? Tell us your stories!
Tags: blog, design magazines, Web Design
Posted in Design Inspiration, Freelancing, Web Design | 2 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 »
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 | 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 »
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 »