Shackadelic Design Rationale

Some design rationale here that I’ve had kicking around in my head for ages but haven’t actually put down on paper. A certain amount of these qualities need to be carried over from the original design – the logo and colour scheme, for example, has long been approved, used & needs to be kept “as is”. I do, however, want to bring it a bit more up-to -date.

1. Logo and colour scheme to be kept as is.

2. Texture and “look and feel” to be similar – in the original design I went for some textural work using a light paper texture and kept colours to browns and neutrals – this helped get the feel of wood, timber, gardens and construction across. Fonts used were “Lobster” for the titles / headings and “Georgia” for body text. This has worked well & all text is legible.

3. A huge part of the redesign will be a fluid / adaptive layout – so design decisions will have to be focused around this. Layouts will need to be simple and uncluttered.

4. The main focus of the Shackadelic site is the ultimately the “portfolio” section. It is important that the site “shows off” the work that the team have done – the downside of this is a large amount of images. The current small thumbnail to lightbox gallery works great on desktop but not on mobile devices – and as such this will need rethinking…these galleries also need to be “swipe” compatible.

5. Chris Hodge, the director, also wants an additional “sheds” page and some form of spam prevention on the contact form.

6. In general Chris wants the site to be clean, simple and responsive with big images that show off their work.

I have some mockups that I have been working on for a while so I’ll try get these into a separate post.