Comments on: On Purpose: Detail and Tone

By: John Anderson

John Anderson — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 08:40:32 +0000

Thanks Lucy, no problem. The house metaphor could run forever, like it! We sometimes talk in car metaphors as well – the dashboard, steering wheel and pedals being the site navigation – but I’ll not go there.

Yes, we also find that lack of clarity in messaging is quite common. Often businesses have great stories to tell the world, but they are buried deep in a site within a long page of small copy. I’ve always thought that many small things can do serious damage, a kind of cumulative effect that tarnishes the experience and the brand. Like a nice car with lots of small dents and scratches (sorry).

By: Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:46:16 +0000

Hi John

Thanks for taking the time to comment so fully on Jordan’s post – and for the link to Rebecca’s post.

I like the metaphor of the grid as the foundations of a house. I wonder how far we can push that? Stakeholder areas as floors in a house or wings of an exhibition hall, perhaps (never a museum!); content blocks as rooms to display the content; social media widgets as … windows, or doors to events/conferences?

And I so agree on legibility and communication. I find some web pages hard to read: not just physically difficult (could be because of small text, poor font choice or low contrast) but sometimes because of a lack of clarity in the content itself, and it can be very frustrating. Even such small things can affect the take-away impression of the brand.

By: John Anderson

John Anderson — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:05:08 +0000

Hi, thanks for the post. I run the design team at The Group, we’re based in London (UK), and we worked closely with Wolseley to design and build the site you mentioned. We’re very pleased you like it and found it easy to use.

Our starting point with the site design for Wolseley – as with any new client – was with deep analysis. Before we made any design decisions we had to get to know the business, the sector, the brand, and study as many branded executions online and offline as we could. Then deconstruct it all, decide what worked, what didn’t, and reassemble to make a new online identity.

Layouts were managed by creating a solid underlying gird system. Making a grid is a bit like defining the foundations of a house, a grid helps us to keep pages aligned consistently across the site, but if well thought out also gives us room to create interesting layouts. Most corporate sites we see have an underlying grid, some better than others.

With colour we worked within the brand, no reason to re-think it, red is the core colour for Wolseley. Nothing really wrong with using red online, it’s more about how you apply it. Using red sparingly and strategically to aid navigation was the aim. Definitely no red text!

On typography I kind of agree when you say keep it simple. For us designers of corporate sites it’s not about self expression, it’s about conveying messages – we use typography to communicate and also complement brand identities. We often find that corporate sites don’t pay enough attention to type hierarchy. Sometimes it’s nice to see a big clear piece of type that speaks confidently and clearly, but also with the bulk of corporate site pages being content heavy, time spent on a legible text page can have a big impact.

We launched the new Wolseley.com early this year. For more information on the job take a look at our post. http://www.the-group.net/blog/index.asp?blogid=521