Go, minimal

After my frustrations with Craiglist detailed in part 4, I decided to try my hand at designing Simande’s site. Please keep in mind that I’m a developer with a Computer Science background and have no formal training in design. I’ve always been interested in design, but my Asian parents convinced me that only doctors, lawyers, and “computer people” make enough money to be a good son.  Anyway, here was my first attempt:

Everything ended up being too monochromatic and cold.  I tried to add some color with the light blue background, but it ended up just not working.  Also, the navigation was way too small so for the next revision I did the opposite and made GIANT navigation.

I thought this was a decent beginning, but I had no idea how to add more color and “life” to the design and I was having trouble laying out the content inside the shell.  Luckily, it was around this time that our current designer came along and expressed interest in our little start up.  Having been formally trained at Pratt and previously worked at Grey and Starwood, I was immediately excited when he wanted to join.  Here’s a pictorial journey through the evolution of Simande’s site design (click the thumbnails for a full-sized image):

The two designs above were the first round drafts.  Initially, we wanted to go with the white version because of its cleaner “spacious” feel, so here were some additional revisions:

As it turns out, our designer felt that we were going down the wrong path and liked the darker background version better because it had a more “elegant” and “boutique” feel.

At this stage we were pretty happy with the overall look and feel of the site design, but we felt there was too much “stuff.”  We wanted to stay true to our principles and keep things SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE, which meant displaying just one portfolio piece and making it large and iconic, and reducing all that extra text into more concise blurbs.  We made the controversial decision of removing “Home” from the navigation bar.  The debate was that the less navigation items, the cleaner the look and its easier to find where to navigate to.  However, less savvy Internet users may not know that clicking a site’s logo should take you back to the home page.  In the end, we decided that we didn’t need to be so explicit and there weren’t enough pages on the site that navigating back a couple times with your browser was a big deal if you didn’t know to click the logo.