New Logo - Torad

This month, we've been working with a Prague-based newly launched venture called Torád. Aimed at food lovers, Torád is centered around a website which will offer recipes every week and provide a box with all the ingredients required to make it. The aim is to provide something new and different from what is available on the traditional market

The Torád team was looking for a logo with a clean typographic approach. They were specifically looking for a custom typeface as they wanted it to be entirely unique. The lettering was to be original, memorable and also function as a stand-alone graphic.

Following their vision and goals, our initial proposals focused on blend of a heavy-weight sans serif with a hand painted logo. We wanted something quite bold with a lot of impact that also had a playful touch.


The top version has some straight lines and elements from a more conventional sans serif. The bottom one has more accentuated curves, closer to a brush script.

Upon discussion, we decided to go for a combination of both versions. Having the letters more flared gives a more distinctive look with stronger personality. We explored various options for letters like the 'T', the 'a' and the accent: stems pointing in different directions, curves of various strengths, different angles, etc. After some final spacing adjustments, the logo is now complete.



The Torád website is currently in development and we're looking forward to the launch. In the meantime, feel free to have a look at our Torád client page for more photos and information.

Website Updated

For the first time in almost a year, our website has been given the long overdue update it has needed.
A huge redesign leaves the old attic theme behind to be replaced by a more clean and modern website that we feel matches our work far better.
As well as the new design, there's a lot of new content on the site. New clients, new side projects and more and there'll be more updates in the coming week.

Despite the size of the site, it remains hand coded and will be updated as such rather than using a CMS. The file structure and much tidier coding make updating the site far easier and a much more welcoming task. This should hopefully prevent us from taking a whole extra year to attend to our own front yard!

New Client Website - On A Disc

Op45 was approached by On A Disc to re-design their company website in order to promote their unique marketing product, the Info Coaster. A memorable and environmentally friendly marketing tool, the Info Coaster presents information to clients on a disc that doubles up as a heat resistant and scratchproof coaster.

The design of the website needed to be fresh and vibrant to match the product as well as being clean and professional to attract the intended target audience. We built a light, spacious design that is carefully structured to clearly present what the product is and how it works.



The images of the Info Coaster in use are accompanied by subtle animations throughout the pages to add dynamic elements without distracting the eye. The presentation animation on the home page features clean, smooth visuals in line with the style of the website to allow the viewer to immediately see what the Info Coaster is about.

Have a look at the live version at On-A-Disc.com to see the rest of the website and stay tuned for the new client page coming soon. The On A Disc team were great to work with and made for a truly enjoyable project.

Latest Typography Work

Having been a while since my last blog post, I thought I'd write a little about my latest typography work. Whilst working on client projects and other Op45 design work, I've been slowly but surely developing a typeface started earlier this year. Having temporarily put aside the original design seen in our typography portfolio, I recently came back to it and decided to radically change it, virtually starting from scratch.



I'm now working on a much more useable typeface; a clean, solid sans-serif with a distinctive character. I'm keeping a strong focus on legibility and the flow of the letters together as much as the shapes of individual letterforms.



The design incorporates humanist qualities to create an original, interesting feel that also remains clean and serious enough for use in a range of situations. The large, open counters aid legibility and the individual elements of the letters are similar enough to maintain an overall cohesive look without being identical.



I'm currently finishing off the lowercase before moving onto the uppercase and numerals. With thoughts of quite a large family including a range of weights, true italics, extensive language support, discretionary ligatures and alternate characters for increased versatility, there's quite a while to go yet!

On a final note, I've found that in between a lot of meticulous, 400% zoomed in, pixel-by-pixel work, it's great to get away from the screen briefly and mess around on paper. Lately, I've been adding a bit of rare colour to my sketches with some watercolour brush work.



I hope to be able to post some typeface updates shortly so check back soon!

The Focus of Modern Website Design

The Focus of Modern Website Design: A look at BBC News' poorly designed update and why it isn't alone.

Countless major websites are 'updating' for the worse.

Perhaps it is the product of the ongoing dispute between web developers and web designers. Developers spurn designers because 'they cant code properly' and designers mock developers for their 'lack of natural instinct and ability to lay out a website in a coherent manner'.

While it's obvious that skill in both areas is a necessity, even if one side of knowledge is slightly weaker than the other; are developers now hugely outnumbering designers? It seems that many major websites today are trading in their beautifully designed space, simplicity and ease of use for large haphazard splashes of information and giving prominence to, albeit nifty, less important fancy features, scripts and web tools.


Chaotic and Cluttered

The most recent example I can think of is the most popular news source online; the BBC News website. They recently updated from a rather old fashioned yet orderly layout into what can only be described as a chaotic and cluttered onslaught of Web 2.0.
Thousands of people have responded to the changes on their editors' blog and, without wanting to delve into quotations, the mass majority having been unflattering.

A well designed website layout needs to give prominence to important information and navigation. This must be immediate. A user needs to see how to use the website and how to get what they want from it immediately otherwise they glaze over and go elsewhere. Whilst it is not the only offender, it's a focus of discussion recently so I'd like to take the example of the BBC News website further.


Inexcusable

Upon entering the website the user is presented with 4 different typeface sizes and weights. Boxes and clusters of text have absolutely no cohesion, random spaces are left between paragraphs and blocks of information. This sort of spacing error is inexcusable for a large, public funded company like the BBC:




Bad Navigation Practice

An extremely important navigational tool is placed far down the page where a user has to scroll around to find and use it, the tool is also bigger than any news story or piece of content on the entire website. Here is a to scale comparison of the largest news article to the right of this enormous navigational tool:



The tool is also unnecessarily complicated to use, and once a user has finally located the area of the site they are looking for, it is often impossible for the user to return to the previous page without using the back button on their browser. This may seem insignificant but it is very bad practice to lose the navigation tool on a page that it directed a user toward.

Inexperienced Monkeys

There were even JPG artifacts in several of the structural images until the BBC News 'design' team noticed and replaced them.
But the most glaringly obvious hint that this website layout could surely only have been designed by inexperienced monkeys is the most fundamentally important towards keeping your website orderly and clean. The alignment of straight edges:



I've used guides to highlight every instance at the top of the BBC News front page where there is a straight edge or blocks of text. Guides are an extremely basic tool used by designers when creating web layouts.
The number of guides is not an issue, this always depends on amount of content. However the spacing and layout of the guides is extremely important to make sure your website doesn't appear cluttered. In other words, each individual guide should have a consistent and systematic amount of space before the next guide. Why does this example allow clusters of items to remain unaligned and yet extremely close to eachother? Because it is poorly designed.


Not a Tirade Against Web Developers

I'm aware that this article probably seems angled towards claiming that Web Developers are to blame for their inability to design, thus fueling the fire I made reference to in my opening paragraph. This isn't the case at all, design and development are both as equally important. Whats the use of a well designed site that doesn't do anything other than display text and images right? This is obviously not a tirade against web developers, but more a look at the possibility of the future of websites and website design.

If unique design is going to become a novelty for the arts world and the business world continues its persuit down the path it seems to be taking these days; aren't we going to end up with a stagnant and ugly world wide web?

Wanbol Web Media Illegally Copy Website

Wanbol Web Media are supposedly a 'web design company'. A web design company who have stolen the code and graphics from Claire's personal portfolio website and used it for their own.
In fact, there is still some of her work on their website that they are claiming is their own. Even some of the website text is the same! It's actually quite funny just how brass necked these people are.


*Edit* Since this article was posted, the company in question have been alerted to this copyright infringement and have taken down their website. See comments below.

Here is Claire's site:



And here is the stolen version, as used by Wanbol Web Media:



Here at Op45 we respect all great design work and the idea of plagiarism is unthinkable. It's quite hard to imagine how any self-respecting website designer could steal somebody else's website and claim it is their own in order to gain clients.

The most hilarious part about this, is that this company haven't noticed that most of the code for the website still has Claire's name inside it. Infact the statistics and analytics code at the bottom is all still in Claire's name so she is getting information about everybody who visits their website.
So this web design company who are using Claire's work to gain clients, actually have no idea how to code a website properly themselves.

The second last thing we at Op45 want to do is put down another graphic design firm. The last thing we ever want to do is even think about taking somebody else's work. But sometimes the likes of Wanbol Web Media shock your very core.

As Wanbol Web Media claim to 'develop unique website solutions', we at Op45 can shake our heads in disgrace at such audacity as we take the right steps to make sure Wanbol Web Media don't get away with this.

Wanbol Web Media: Design Thieves

Viva la design original.

New Client Website

We've recently completed work for Phil's Boot Camp, an outdoor fitness training group based in north eastern England.
We're pending final approval as I write this and we're overall enthusiastic about the job as a whole. Having done several business corporate works in a row it was a nice change to let our ideas run with a layout for a trendy-yet-professional outdoor fitness company. The design and structure was enjoyable to develop and the subject was new and interesting.

Phil is a great guy to work with which more than boosted the enjoyment of working on the project.
Our work will be posted on our site as soon as it has been approved; there were a few nice little tweaks and additions to our coding repertoire in the process.

We have also been working on some logo proposals for a company based in the USA. We will no doubt have more details on this as time progresses.