Web and print design is a key part of the marketing message, and it’s important that designers do detailed background work to determine the message before the first element of design is started.

For web sites, clear messaging, easy navigation, and clean design are important. For print, whether it’s an audio CD, a theatre poster, a photo montage, a timeline/chronology, or an organisation’s banner, the designer should force the clients to get clear on their marketing positioning and messaging first, because it drives all aspects of the design.

Examples

This is the fourth version of this site. The first three designs I did myself, and for this version I hired another designer to re-do the look and feel. David Kerr came up with the new concept for the home page, and animated the quotes.

I’ve since redesigned the structure of the site, and considering it contains so much material, it’s pretty well organized and easy to navigate.

Rich Rogue Arts

Theatre Company

This design was completely organic, my only guiding thought was that the site’s colours should invoke the decor of an arts club like the one in the photo on the home page.

I used a book of colour schemes and selected one of the palletes, a four-colour combination. I created blocks of each colour and moved them around until I found a sequence and combination I liked. (The light brown, for example, is an awful colour on its own, and even with the others looks ugly as a solid colour block. It is, however, fantastic as an accent colour.) I created a fifth colour, the light blue used as the page background and the menu text.

The menu uses an image background, and has as a highlight image a transparent 20% screen, so changing the menu is as simple as adding, deleting or moving menu items and recompiling the javascript—no changes to graphics are necessary.

Jbm Training

Corporate training

This was a small starter site, only about ten pages, designed to leverage the credibility the company has earned over the years, and update it with their current service offerings. It replaced a single page that wasn’t very compelling.

Challenges included creating a web-friendly version of their logo, and converting widely divergent photos of the trainers (some were head shots, some full body shots, et cetera). Apologies — the javascript menu isn’t visible in the archive.

I revised the copy to make it clear and compelling, and added created a “contact” form that allows people to register for seminars. (Their current site is considerably different from the starter site I created.)

I’ve always believed that “under construction” pages are boring. And a cop out. Put up a single page that says what you do.

I created a single page site that was far, far better than what they had: a logo, address and “coming soon” message that said nothing about what they did.

The new site was just a single page, but was all they needed at the time, and served them for many years. It outlined their market positioning and value proposition, which we completely re-wrote (aspects of which they are still using today).