Studio FEED deliver their first series of boards
Hi Fady,
Here are my comments regarding the web mock-ups sent last night.
Here are the first mock-ups for Bluesponge’s website. It has to be considered as a draft and the main intention is to check whether the architecture fits with the wireframes you sent us earlier this week. It also enables us to test the first levels of hierarchy from a typographical point of view. The use of colour has been volontarily constrained to a minimum in order to keep the focus essentially on architecture and different levels and layers of information for now.
Please note that we always kept on our mind the fact that you essentially want to focus on editorial content and references to prints (magazines and newspapers).
Regarding navigation, as the total number of services will not exceed 5, we divided the site in 6 columns. The first one is dedicated to managing “traditional” navigation tools (other options and elements can be added later if required).The other 5 columns are used for a secondary navigation system, one that is more ‘intuitive’.
The use for the columns varies for each and every page models that follow, depending on the type of content.
For the landing page, I favored a main and central space that you could use for the projects/posts/news items that you consider of utmost importance. The space in question could be managed as a slideshow in order to present several items rather than just one. A series of posts will be available under that space: some shorter, some longer, some with images and others without any, thus creating some kind of visual rhythm similar to magazines and newspapers.
As for the ‘Project’ page, I will make some adjustments and let you know the maximum number or words for the introductory paragraph so the first ‘related posts’ are always visible within a 768 pixels high bloc. Both right handside columns will host the lists of related services and clients, awards, partners, URLs and tags. Displaying all those items in two columns eliminates the need to scroll down.
And finally, regarding the ‘Services”. After Fady’s input regarding the terms I didn’t fully understand in the provided wireframes, we agreed on using only 3 columns for the posts’ thumbnails, using the fourth one for the ‘tag cloud’.
Raphael @ Studio FEED
I dig. Content is king! Except for the last wireframe, I don’t understand and it doesn’t seem to correspond to the text above. What platform are you guys gonna use for this? WP? I’m turning into a Drupal nerd more and more everyday. Checkout http://happycog.com/ (or don’t if you wanna keep your thought process uncluttered), looks like they employ a similar approach to great effect.
I guess my final input would be to streamline that navigation; I’m not sure two navs right at the top that may or may not (I suppose depending on the content) direct users to the same content is a good idea and it distracts from the focus of your message, which I think is best served by the “insight vision”, “design strategy” … etc columns. Why compromise on the ‘traditional’ right off the top? If its gotta be somewhere, chuck it in the bottom and maintain a tighter narrative up on high since I think that’s BS strength – the ability to craft a story. Particularly since out of: “projects, clients, lab , collaborators” 3/4 could basically mean the same thing, ie projects, collaborators and clients might in essence really describe the same item of content: a project, and for that matter lab and projects could be indistinguishable from a totally naive perspective. If you wanna provide a simple shortcut right to the heart of the matter for repeat visitors simplify that list and put it somewhere secondary – they’ll know where to find it.
Guess it literally is all just semantics