Brand Design Blog, News and Ideas

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.

If you have anything to do with web design or the internet, here’s a website that you really must bookmark.

Click here to view the Web Developer’s Handbook

We’ve just launched the updated JHL Civil website.

JHL Civil, Pipeline Construction Specialists, have discovered the returns available by having an online presence are looking to expand their penetration into the market.

So to help them achieve their online goals we’ve revisited their existing web site design to allow for expansion.

The new navigational system has been simplified with the aim to become far more user friendly and to allow the addition of multiple new sections that are to be added in the near future.

If you have a chance to look at the code. We’ve also taken time to clean up the source html so allow for faster page loading and better search engine spidering.

The simplification and optimization in the coding should also allow for better search engine listings.

If you would like to learn more about JHL Civil you can check out the JHL Civil, Pipeline Construction website here.

While there is still great content in graphic design reference books, you may never need to purchase one again after looking at some of the functionality on flickr.com

Flickr is a photo gallery website. You can upload your photos and imagery free of charge and use it as storage or as a gallery that you can show your friends.

Sound cool, sure…but so what?

Well, the real power of flickr comes from the ability to tag keywords to your images.

For instance, if you have a screen grab of your website that’s just been redesigned, you’d tag it as ‘web design’. It then places your image into your web design category.

O.K. so that makes it easy to find sure but again…so what?

Not only can you view your images, but you can view everyone’s images. You can also do over all searches for certain tags, such as ‘web design’ and you’ll not only find your image but everyone other image that has been labeled the same.

Getting the picture?

There are thousands and thousands of great examples of great work you can view for inspiration and new ideas.

You can even create a slideshow based on these searches.

Check out this slideshow for Business Card design that I came across this week.

Pretty impressive right?

So go to flickr.com and try it out for yourself. Flickr has heaps of other great functions that I’ll talk about later so stay tuned.

If you come up with something great link to it in the comments area of this blog.

I want to draw everyones attention to a great site that I’ve been aware of for some time, but crept back onto my radar this week.

Design Melt Down.com

It’s a gallery site for hundreds of fantastic web site designs.

Not only does it house an unending supply of inspiration for the struggling web designer but it also comes equipped with a great navigational system that allows you to search for sites by theme, style and even colour.

So if you have a spare couple of hours or even 5 minutes, I’d recommend heading over there and checking it out.