As much as we loved our old website, with it’s rascally raccoons and vintage typewriter aesthetic, we knew it was time to start fresh. We’d learned a ton about design since then, and wanted to show off our new chops. Hopefully this case study will help you with your next redesign — because there’ll always be another one — and give you some insight into our process. Let us know what you think.
North star
Whenever you begin anew, it’s good to have a few guiding lights. Our main goal was to have our own website look as engaging, modern, and professional as the best work we’ve done for our clients. It’s so true about the shoemaker’s kids with the holes in their soles!
We were actually able to borrow the color palette from the old site but brought the brighter colors to the front, which lightened things up and created a lot of energy. We discovered the blocky display font while looking for something that would stack well. It also nods toward video games and graphic novels and has a bit of a playful vibe.
Those photographic-style illustrations from Qomikin Studio really knock us out. We think they bring a ton of class to the overall design and pair well with our font and color choices.
With the colors, fonts, and some images in hand, the pages came together fairly quickly after several chocolate-fueled 12-hour sessions.
Menu
We’re big fans of short and sweet.
Home Page
In the Marketing 101 books it says, “sell the benefit, not the feature.” You want to summarize your service or product from the reader’s point of view. “Tell them what their problem is and why it is so awful, and tell them how great they’ll feel when the problem is solved.” Instead of getting hyperbolic, we decided to get right to the point and simply list out what it is that makes websites successful.
We added some subtle movement but didn’t want to lean on animation too much. The call-to-action buttons evolved from links to normal buttons to the arrows. We’re definitely fans of an iterative workflow style, where you quickly sketch things out and then keep returning to them as the page as a whole takes shape.
Online Store
Coming soon, we’re excited about the design potential.
Contact Page
Contact pages are often an afterthought, but in reality they might be the most important page on your site. We went big and bold and fun.
404 Page
You’d be surprised at how often folks end up on your 404 page. The longer your site’s been around, the more your pages get shuffled and links break. With a solid maintenance plan you’ll fix most of them, but when a visitor lands on the page-not-found page, we wanted to turn that sometimes frustrating experience into an opportunity for a chuckle.
