Continued from page 1
LAYOUT: - www.grayofficefurnishings.com - www.place-crete.com
For both of these sites, as discussed above, I wanted to go with a clean, sleek, compact design layout. This would accomplish consistency, clarity, easy navigation, visual interest, and a comfort level with
viewer.
SHAPE: Working along with
layout, I wanted to use shapes that reinforced some of
conceptual ideas found within
subject matter itself. - www.grayofficefurnishings.com With
Gray Office Furnishings site, I chose to utilize some of
basic "language" found in
different types of furniture that they offered. This includes soft curves, hard edges, straight lines, repetition, contrast (big & small), grooves/cut pieces (moving parts), displacement, symmetry/asymmetry, organic/mechanical, etc. While using this "visual language," I strived to achieve a balance between all of
above. Just as furniture is an art form, so was
process of trying to capture
balance of these contrasting ideas.
- www.place-crete.com With
Place-Crete site, I used
same "visual language" that I just described above with Gray Office Furnishings; however, with Place-Crete I had a different message to convey. Place-Crete deals with concrete, cement, engineering, construction, and
like. Very industrial sounding stuff. Hard edges, straight lines, grid based blueprints/schematics, smooth finishes, hard surfaces, etc. So that became my "visual language" with their site.
COLOR: - www.grayofficefurnishings.com Just as described above in
"Shape" section, there is a duality within
characteristics of different types of furniture. I wanted to capture
warmth of wood, and
coolness of synthetic materials -
vibrancy of some colors, and
conservativeness of others. Once again, I tried to achieve a balance between these contrasts. There are different styles and themes of office furniture, and of course different types of people and offices. With this in mind, I had to create a site with a broader focus. My aim was to try and appeal to all of them in a professional, clean, and organized fashion.
- www.place-crete.com With Place-Crete, I wanted to capture
cool smooth nature of concrete. In addition, I added a bit of "construction yellow" to counteract
overwhelming coolness of this site. The goal was to create an image of professionalism, cleanliness, precision, and craftsmanship. I wanted to leave no doubt in
viewers mind that this company meant business, and that they hold themselves to extremely high standards.
IMAGES: - www.grayofficefurnishings.com Just as with
other design elements described above, I wanted to create contrast and balance between two opposing concepts. I tried to choose images that would capture these ideas... including color, shape, size, etc.
- www.place-crete.com I tried to utilize images that wouldn't necessarily reveal too much of
messy details, but ones that would generate enough interest, and maintain
design theme that has been established - cool, engineered, industrial, hard edge, precise, and clean. I wanted to create a sense of absolute confidence - a boldness that implied that this company knew exactly what it was doing, and can be trusted.
FONT CHOICE: - www.grayofficefurnishings.com - www.place-crete.com For both of these sites,
font choice was fairly simple. Since both of these sites aim for a clean look, a simple and sleek sans-serif font such as Arial or Helvetica was used (sans-serif means that
strokes of
letters don't have caps or feet at its joints or ends like Times for example).
DOWNLOAD TIME: While both of these sites appear to be fairly "image heavy," they are not as bad in terms of download time as you might think. Nobody likes to wait forever to see your site... especially busy business people. Keeping
audience in mind, I aimed to create
perfect balance between beautiful imagery and reasonable download times. On one hand we didn't want to have a dry and boring site; and on
other we needed it to download fast enough for our targeted audience.
CONCLUSION
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Doug Seidl is a member of the Worldprofit Design Team at www.worldprofit.com Remember, your site must be appealing in design AND make use of tested successful marketing techniques. Let our expert design marketers work for you! Contact mailto:customerservice@worldprofit.com