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…

Pushing the boat out

In order to give a feel for the venue and bring visual impact we used huge background photographs that showcase the interior and gently fade behind the site content. Easy to read? Errrr. User friendly? Well ummmm… Pretty? We think so – because sometimes the rule book is there to be torn into teeny little shreds and scoffed at like a bully taking a geeks dinner money.

We pushed the boat out a bit with the front-end implementation too, Using lots of CSS3 transitions and effects with transparency, rounded corners and text-shadow / box-shadow declarations being the order of the day. Of course you’ll only get the full effect if you’re viewing the site in Webkit enabled browsers Safari and Chrome or to a lesser extent the very latest builds of Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer.

Tech wise the site is built around Teleriks Sitefinity Content Management System in order to provide full site publishing and the solution also Event management and offers the user great ways to interact with the site such as Blogs, ‘members-only areas’. Facebook integrated online booking forms complete the package in order that Soyo can continue to engage with its audience in targeted ways.

Of course the most enjoyable and remarkable jobs are always made easier given a remarkable client to work with so many thanks to the guys at Soyo: Efe Omu, Mark Welch, Louis Gadd and Matt Cottrill for their input, understanding and efforts during the entire process. Never have we worked with such savvy people – always interested in the nitty gritty of the design and (incredibly) build process, they’ve been instrumental in shaping the site and it’s aesthetic and we’re confident (like never before) that they’ll go on to successfully shape the site content and improve the SEO with their enthusiasm for web-tech and design.

Soyo says…

When gently poked for some feedback on the madewithpixels experience the guys at Soyo had this to say:
“We’re really happy with the site and had fun working with Michael and Jon – it really felt like we were involved in the process and the end result is exactly what we were expecting. We’ve also learned a bit about stuff like web standards and browser capabilities so we understand a lot more and know a lot more jargon than before which has really helped us to get the best out of it. We’ve got a fantastic end result with every feature we asked for from a price point the other agencies we approached couldn’t even get close to. We’re really looking forward to working with these guys in the future and developing the integration between the site and our Facebook page.”

Check it out at www.soyo.me