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…
It’s always nice to gain a bit of recognition, so I’m very happy to report that I seem to be getting rather a lot of link love lately! Quite a few well respected web design and CSS galleries have listed me as an exemplary example of minimalism… So thanks very much indeed to everyone concerned! Your traffic is appreciated beyond words!
During the year 2000; The Insight CBT Partnership focussed 10 years of research and training of mental health teams and home carers in CBT for patients with severe schizophrenia. The results were perfectly clear; this new approach to the treatment of psychosis using Insight CBT has proven clinical benefits; Patients and carers alike responded positively to the methodology and subsequent bed days for the severely mentally ill were dramatically reduced.
In early 2010 we launched an online brand and resource portal that helps to connect the Insight Partnership with it’s audience and the wider healthcare industry at large. Providing a platform from which CBT trainers and trainees can meet, interact and gain knowledge and training on the cutting edge of cognitive behavioral therapy.
We used our old favourite Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS to provide full content and user management. Customising the software heavily to add case study Q&A sessions, chat rooms and PayPal payment integration for the varying levels of membership.
It’s fair to say that we’re very pleased indeed with the final outcome. The design is largely atypical and stands out from the crowd while remaining useable. largely this is due to an incredibly trusting and flexible client. Bringing only a single (yes one!!) demand for a ‘logo like an opening door’ (- et voila) the guys at Insight were a pleasure to work with and we had a jolly old time having tea and biscuits in hotel meeting rooms across the north.
Being the all round creative type dudes that they are. The lads at ay-pe cannot – it seems stop tinkering with their small but perfectly formed website. Great news for me for obvious reasons but also always extremely satisfying to turn out such creative work.
Deciding to ditch the old javascript enhanced menu system in favour of a more traditional approach that relies on nothing other than crisp typography – we’ve given the entire site a new look and introduced some small structural changes. An extended portfolio section retains simplicity but builds individuality into with some pages with large background images. Some pages having a very distinct feel helps the site to feel somewhat like a magazine and rewards the users that explore.
There’s not much else to say about this one so I’ll let ay-pe’s amazing work speak for itself at www.ay-pe.com and in their glorious showreel below.
Ahh the smell of freshly laid pixels. The allure of a grid so tight you could use it to forge digital Shredded Wheat (this has become very daft, very quickly). What the hell am I talking about? Well look around dude; this pimp has new threads. Word!
It’s been a good twelve months since the MWP website had a make-over; and although it’s still wearing the same WordPress undies (rinsed out in the sink though – what do you take us for?) there’s an all new look and feel to celebrate my first successful year as a freelancer.
Things have been gone well this year even if I do say so myself, I’ve worked on over twenty projects. Websites for the pharmaceutical, healthcare, media and tourism industries as well as a number of touch-screen multimedia installations at various Museums and Visitor Centres up and down the country.
I suppose it’s been an odd year to start a business, what with t’old credit crunch and all that malarkey. Not that it’s seemed to effect us too much to be honest – it seems like our backgrounds, portfolios and contacts have stood us in good stead. Our clients have been reporting being pleasantly surprised when receiving our costs, certainly when compared to quotes received from other agencies. The fact that we’re small, agile and have little or no overheads except a world-class web host so that we can pass these savings on to our clients seems to be a concept that’s worked very well indeed. We’ve delivered some big projects, at a cost most agencies wouldn’t get out of bed for. Not only that, but we’ve done very nicely for ourselves and enjoyed the summer sun too. Result!
Building on the successful launch of the ay-pe website. The guys in York requested an update recently. So we thought we’d have some fun!
Given the hand-drawn nature of ay-pe’s latest and greatest project; an animated flip-book telling the story of the cultural history at Clitheroe Castle. Ay-pe asked if we could reflect the look and feel of their AV production and bring some movement to the page.
We love the concept of things coming ‘full circle’ here at madewithpixels. So when we were offered an opportunity to re-think, enhance and re-launch an award-winning website for a major visitor attraction that we’d been involved with more than a decade ago. We thought all our birthdays had come at once.
Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire borders is one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe and is currently working towards ‘World Heritage’ Status – a label that would see it ranked alongside historical luminaries such as Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
A Limestone Gorge, Cave System, Country Park, Wildlife Reserve, Museum and Visitor Attraction; Creswell Crags, it’s object collections, research, exhibitions and website are supported (most notably) by the British Museum, who’s curator of pre-history; Jill Cook had a large hand in conceiving and planning. In the early nineties I’d worked on the team that put the original site and its award winning content together. Now, more than ten years later – we’d get to improve upon the design, enhance the content and introduce some new ideas of our own.
Minimalism is actually surprisingly difficult to achieve. Especially on the internet. Buttons, forms, calls-to-action. All of these things are generally consdidered ‘the norm’; and all of them threaten the purity of a minimalistic approach.
When ay-pe, a York based CGI and Video Post Production House approached us with a website brief that comprised: one button, big images and hardly any text. We leapt at the chance to get involved. Keeping it simple means just that; as little fuss and dressing as possible. Let the content sing, let the images shine. So that’s what we did.
One school of thought when starting on your first project as a fledgling web agency might be: Start small – work your way up. Another might be – take the largest project you can manage; and ace it. We chose the latter.
Mednet Consult are a Healthcare communications agency based in Leeds. Working closely with pharmaceutical giant Janssen Cilag, Mednet organises and project manages meetings, events and integrated training packages for NHS Mental Health Professionals. They asked us to help take them online.
In January 2009, we designed and built a website that would provide a platform from which Mednet could publish and promote details of its product offerings and communicate its core values to the marketplace. Our bespoke content management system delivers Event Management; Assessed and Certified Case Study E-learning tests and Online Questionnaires; all wrapped up in a contemporary ‘light on dark’ design that was surprisingly well received by what might potentially be perceived as a stuffy industry.
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.
