Brand Design Blog, News and Ideas

Trades people, including builders, carpenters, plumbers and electricians are finding that the online space is really where advertising dollars are needing to be spent to get results.

We’ve seen some great results from customer website, including $480,000+ client work coming directly through search engines and websites.We’ve just completed work on a new project for Glenrich Builders, a Building and Construction Company in the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne.

Glenrich builders specialise in New Homes, Renovation and Extensions and the task here was to get that message across through the use of text that would later be indexed by Google Search Engines. We we’re also required to include all content from the existing site while rebranding the look for their new corporate identity.

The new site design, copywriting and back end structure should lead to some profitable results for the year ahead.

If you’re a trades person looking for a web solution including online advertising, web design and search engine optimisation, give us a call to discuss the possibilities.

We’ve just completed work on the base branding for skinsaviour, a great new range of skin care products designed for both men and women.

Their inital logo concept reflects the Punga - a native fern in New Zealand, where the inspiration for skinsaviour was born.

Using the Punga as a base we’ve expanded on the idea to create a brand image that reflects the natural feel of the New Zealand forests.

The website at www.skinsaviour.com.au draws from this imagery as well as combining cool blue colours and imagery that describe the fresh clean feel that the skinsaviour products create.

While we’re still completing the finishing touches to the site, it’s fully functional and receiving orders.

When you get the chance visit www.skinsaviour.com.au for a closer look.

After a 6 month hiatus, the team at Boagworld.com are back and better than ever.

The new site design looks fantastic. Adding the flare of ‘web 2.0′ with the usability and accessibility that Boagworld prides itself on, the new web site design is easier to navigate and an enjoyable experience to visit.

For those of you who don’t know – Boagworld.com is the brain child of Paul Boag, a U.K. based web designer and speaker on usability and accessibility in web design. Together with Marcus Lillington, Paul hosts the weekly Boagworld podcast that discusses on all things relating to building and running websites.

If you aren’t listening to this podcast and you are running a website. I’d suggest that you subscribe today (you can do so from their web site.

I’d also suggest that you go through their back catalogue of issues and soak up all the useful information they have to talk about.

Hello everybody.

I’ve been incredibly busy over the last couple of weeks so unfortunately there has been a break in recent posts.

So, I thought I’d show you one of the recent projects that I’ve been up to.

R & R Real Estate is an Estate Agents based in the South East Suburbs of Victoria.

The aim on this site is to draw customers to the 3 core business areas of the business, Selling, Buying and Renting Property while at the same time allowing the web site to maintain a pleasing, professional aesthetic.

I think we’ve succeeded with this solution. What do you think?

Here’s quite a good article from the Wakeuplater.com blog

It details some of the common web design mistakes made by developers, amateurs and design beginners.

While experienced designers may find the article to simply be common sense – The points mentioned, make for a good reminder and an excellent read for those new to web design.

Certainly worth a read.

In the design industry you often hear the phrase ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ or ‘Keep it simple, son’.

Both amount to the same acronym ‘K.I.S.S.’

Keep those 4 letters in your head and you’ll do alright.

So, why keep it simple? What does keeping it simple mean?

Well, the reality behind the idea of ‘keeping it simple’ is pretty straight forward.

The simpler you make a design, the less chances you have to make a mistake.

Each element that is added to a design (of any sort) ’should’ have a purpose. It should perform a task or fulfill a need. It should target a purpose.

‘Purpose targets’ can involve everything from function to communication to efficiency.

By adding unnecessary elements to a design, your design requires more power to perform its function, the message you wish to communicate is diluted, and your design performs at a lower efficiency.

Here are some examples:

• Logos designed with fine line work. Viewed at a small size the line work becomes jumbled or disappears. The same when large logos are viewed from a distance.
• Television ads. Too much background noise, music or sound effects. Causes the message spoken by the voice over to be hard to hear. You miss the message.
• Magazine advertising. Too many messages or too much text dilute the most important idea. The messages fight for attention. You end up with the reader not receiving enough impact from any one message. They fail to be called to act on your idea.

So with each element you add, you have another chance of missing the purpose target and ultimately causing the overall design to miss it’s full potential.

By keeping the elements involved in a design to a bare minimum, you have less chance to miss your purpose targets and you allow your design to become efficient.

I see examples of over complicated design every day.

Have you seen design that could be simplified to become more efficient?

Can you simplify your own designs?

There is more to this topic, including Keeping it simple for customers. Which I may discuss in another post.

But for now, I’d be interested in your feedback.

We’ve just completed work on a Life Insurance Website.

Life Insurance Advocates are specialist insurance brokers working out of the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.

The brief was to encourage more people to contact the Brokers via their website presence.

So we broke the task down into two major areas.

Firstly, to take the old, dated design and restyle the website branding to give it a new, fresh look. While in the process giving it a friendlier face and making the sites ‘online’ contact areas more accessible.

Second. Our client wanted a stronger search engine presence for key terms within their industry. To begin this process, we cut out all the table based design and moved towards CSS styling. Allowing for less coding and easier crawling for Search Engine Spiders.

We also moved all important keyword phases to be text based to once again make them more accessible to the Search Spiders.

All major service areas of the business were also given their own pages to make for more relevant listings and copywriting was reviewed for additional search penetration.

This natural (white hat) form of search engine optimization pays off well in the long run, as it’s less prone to the ups and downs of chasing after Googles latest Algorithms (not that that is an exact science either).

You can check the site out at www.lifeinsuranceadvocates.com.au.

I’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on the site revision.

Here’s some really interesting new technology.

In the video below you’ll see a new program that allows for imagery to be scaled based on element importance, rather than simply stretching or squashing the image.

Watch the video and you’ll see how it all works.

Looks great right?

Sure…but this technology has ramifications for the design and photography industry. Here’s on photographers point of view.

But…don’t we already have problems with amateur designers distorting images?

Could this be better than the alternative?

Finally, watch this reply to the photographers argument.

Either way, it’s really interesting technology that has amazing possibilities.

So, what’s your view on the topic?

Do you see technology such as this as good or evil in the online design landscape?

Let me know. I’d love to read your thoughts.

White space is an important element in creating clean, functional design.

The idea of white space does not relate to the colour white, but instead the allowance of space surrounding a design object.

By allowing this ‘white space’ we let objects function without being impacted by surrounding design elements.

To explain more, I found this great article by Mark Boulton at Alistapart.com

We’ve just completed work on the first rendition of the Frimokar Website.

The site is a work in progress currently only incorporate the low resolution imagery that was available at the time. But we are expecting to take comments over the next month to allow us a better understanding of what imagery and features our audience would like to see.

The website does include some great video functionality and is coded with Search Engine Optimization in mind.

You can check the Frimokar: High Pressure Water Blasting website here.