madewithpixels ♥ soyo
Another month, another site launch. This one – it’s fair to say. We’re especially pleased with. Mainly as it’s a regular watering hole for me and my drinking buddies and one of Sheffield’s most dedicated purveyors of lovely graphic design.
Soyo is a late bar and premiere pre-club destination located in the heart of Sheffield City Centre. Slick and swanky yet retaining that definite edge that embodies cool – these guys have got a good grip on the importance of effective graphic design in shaping their business identity. They’ve previously drawn on the cream of Sheffield’s design and illustration community working with people such as The Hantu Collective and Kiosk’s (ex Designers Republic) David Bailey to provide awesome corporate ID, signage and promotional materials.
Obviously – we were delighted to be asked to design and build their website. It’s not everyday we get to play (and play we did) with such a cracking little brand and we had a LOT of fun pushing these little Scrabble inspired pixels around.
We decided fairly early on to keep things edgy rather than too slick. Utilising a punky layout that doesn’t define or demand any particular aesthetic language in order that it will happily hold any of the wide variety of graphic styles employed by the bar across their specifically branded promotions. Such an atypical layout does demand a certain amount of work from the user to initially take in the various elements, so we made sure to work extra hard to provide useful and relevant content that’s accessible and easy to access with a structure based on a widely spaced grid to provide maximum readability under difficult circumstances…