‘After spending a year with WDL I am sadly moving onto new pastures. During this time I have worked on a range of client projects such as Saffron’s branding development, 123app website design and The Barn Brasserie menu designs. It has been a great experience working within a growing team of enthusiastic and dedicated individuals from whom I have learnt a lot and also working with driven clients to produce materials for their businesses.’ – Rob

Retail Design Solutions approached us to re-design their current website which is currently in production. One of the key aspects to the re-design was to portray the size of the company, over 30 employees, along with showcasing the specialist skill set and renowned client base that they have. We instantly thought of using photography to portray the right messages which would be used on the website and also for future marketing material. We visited their offices for the day where we took photographs of the building and personnel. Everyone was very helpful and we captured some great photographs of the team, including the resident dog, which can be seen on their new website shortly.

Recently we have been working with Optimum Cooling who are an Air Conditioning and Refrigeration company based in Colchester. We are currently working on a re-design of their current website using their existing branding along with content consultancy to ensure the content on their website is SEO friendly. We have also been asked to create a 3 metre x 1 metre display banner, an interactive presentation slide show and also supporting printed material.

We look forward to building a lasting relationship with Optimum Cooling to ensure that their business marketing material is in cohesion with their business plan.

As a quick recap, the current issue with fonts on websites is that in order for a website to display text in a specific font, that font must be installed on the user’s computer. The list of fonts that are (almost) guaranteed to be on every computer is tiny (around 10). This gives us extremely limited options when choosing a font for the text of a site.

Thousands of other fonts are available to use but are restricted by licensing and cannot be distributed.

We have, however started testing and using third-party web font services such as Typekit. These services take care of all the licensing requirements and allow us access to vast libraries of fonts.

So, at the end of the day what’s the advantage of all this font business? Simply put, beautifully designed websites with typography to match that is clean, accessible, user friendly and search engine friendly.

Although on devices such as the iPhone you are able to zoom in to a small part of a page to read the content or interact with it, this is not how the page was intended to be viewed. It was designed to be viewed and used on a larger laptop or desktop monitor.

Not only is size and scale becoming more of a factor in websites, but the ways in which the user can navigate and interact with a site are growing. Keypads, directional buttons, remote controls, video game controllers and touch screens are now all viable methods for browsing the internet and are only going to become more popular.

The solution, fortunately, is not to create a number of separate websites that cater for all the different sizes of display and types of input, but to build one responsive and adaptive website that can automatically scale in size, reorganise in layout and adapt in orientation to suit any type of screen or device.

Not only is this the most cost effective way but it is also the most simple and the most easily managed way of providing websites to the vast array of connected devices we find ourselves surrounded by.

If you would like us to take a look at the overall design consistency of your business please give us a call. We’d be happy to discuss the presentation of your business and make suggestions to assist with the efficiency of your brand identity.

A few teaser images of a project we are currently working on. More pictures will follow soon.

We have been taking some pictures for our website today and this was our favourite by far. Notice how both Tom and the monkey are smiling, but at what ?