STUPID Studio had an awesome blog. But together we’ve just added some more awesomeness with the updated STUPID theme 2.0. The most significant change is that the site isn’t “just” a blog anymore. It’s a full-featured corporate site also with cases.

We’ve added a really cool live filter to the case-section. In three levels you can filter out what sort of projects you would like to watch. Kind’a cool!

Visit the site here or our STUPID case here.

We’ve designed about 6 different universes which is produced in carton. These universes will work as full screen backgrounds. Furthermore the idea is to place Studio Strange’s products in the universes. Off course this is still just sketches and dummies, but we think the project will evolve into a different web site. Anyway the process is a lot different than we’re used to, and it’s positive to get our hands into something else. Something analogue!

Through January we’ll be doing the “real” photo-shoot with the “real” universes. We’re looking forward to show you more from this project…

Yes, it’s a box of chocolate from Summerbird which we’ve just sent out to our clients, business partners and good relations.

Mums Studio is soon celebrating it’s 1-year birthday, and what a year! We couldn’t have asked for more… We’ve been busy with all sort of projects, all exciting projects! Among other things, we’ve been designing the corporate identity for Solo Data ApS, Digitech, ediva ApS. We’ve developed a great blog-platform for STUPID Studio which is soon to be further developed. We’ve just finished a project for RejserFraTyskland.dk which includes a national television campaign. We’ve build CM Systems, designed web-sites, sound and print-identities, we’ve been on photo-shoots with clients such as Grene Industri-service, SCHNOOR and Theia.

And we’re off course more than ordinary pleased to see that 2010 seems to be quite promising also. Through 2010 we will be working on new projects and new clients such as, Designbureauet Emma Toft, Printbook, Karup Airport, Lotis Furniture, Odense International Film Festival (with STUPID Studio), Studio Strange, SCHNOOR, and a lot more.

Thank you!

We would like to thank everyone who have been a part of a fantastic first year with Mums Studio.

Merry Christmas!

ediva has been a big and great project, which we’ll continue to develop. At this moment we’ve designed their corporate identity, designed everything on the web site, build the WP CMS, designed their print identity, and spoken a lot on the phone.

Have a look at ediva.dk or at our ediva case

As a designer we’ve all tried it. The client who wants a simple site, but don’t have any content, text, pictures, no identity really, no nothing. So there you stand, with a client who expects you to do magic with nothing. To invent something brilliant. I always find these kind of projects the hardest though it’s like creative freedom. Often the most simple design is the hardest to accomplish, because simple design will not work unless there is some kind of central idea. It could be a special navigation, big picture backgrounds, some simple AJAX functionality, or just something that won’t leave the user back with the feeling of a unfinished or boring site.

The “less is more” idea really requires some talent.

Recently I had one of those projects, and thought, why not share the process? Maybe one or two could use my thoughts for something.

Identity

Do the client have some kind of existing identity? Logo, corporate colors, fonts, whatever… Something you should be aware of before you start the design process.

In my case, there were only a logo and a outdated web-design. Nothing else. In a situation like that, personally I like to make some guide-lines for myself. Meaning, I spend some time finding typography which would fit this client. I think about colors, compositions and style. Generally thinking of a kind of profile for this design. What kind of business is this, what do we want to express? There’s a huge difference between corporate and fashion…

From the old site, we chose to keep;

01. The logo
02. The use of numbers and relatively big typography
03. The architecture with the centered ribbon-like content-container which, as in the old design, should be 100% width of the browser

Trends

Take a look at the trends. Read some magazines or use an hour or two surfing the Internet, check your RSS feed for new stuff to get your creativity to flow… For this project I found a lot of inspiration in the Computer Arts Projects issues about “Design Trends in 2009″, “The Art of Web Design”, and off course Smashing Magazine‘s article about “Web Design Trends for 2009“

Kind of quick I found what I was going for. A web-design heavily based on typography and some kind of letterpress-use, spiced up with the use of colorful, full screen background-images. I wanted to keep it clean and “flat”.

I wanted to let the beautiful Helvetica dominate the content-area. My inspiration were;

I love when small details is made with typography. Like ending a line or a paragraph with a “/”-sign, a “+”-sign or a “_”-sign

Credits;

01. 50 years of Helvetica
02. Thank fuck for Helvetica

Kind

You have to make up which kind of business you are designing for. In this case it was 0% corporate and 100% lifestyle. In my opinion that means less text and more visual appealing content.

Big pictures

I wanted to base this web-design on big pictures. So I went online and bought some dummy content at iStock. From that I could begin designing something to show my client. My first mock-ups looked like this:

Pictures for the presentation are bought at iStock.

Typography

Find suitable typography is just as important as the whole webdesign. Again you should take a look at the business. In this case I was designing for a business in the fashion industry, which made me go with a sans-serif font.

Actually I never had any doubt. From the beginning I was kind of sure of what kind of typography I was going to use. Helvetica is the perfect font for this kind of use, and at the same time it fits the business well. The other thing I thought of, was that the typography would be an integrated and central thing in the design, why it should be a font capable of that use. Furthermore there’s a ton of different weights in the Helvetica family…

Navigation

Even though you’re a designer, some things you don’t have to invent. Meaning, something central as the navigation of a website, isn’t supposed to leave people go “what the hell?!”. It have to be intuative and easy to use the site. Or else people will leave the site…

I made this navigation very simple, but still with the “letterpress  / mask”-effect.

The idea

Because of the simple design and the fact that this site never was meant to carry a lot of content, I wanted to make it special in another way. Because of the fullscreen slideshow in the background, the site is very easy to give a make-over. A photoshoot, 10 new images, and you have the impression of a new site, because of the central use of the images.

I wanted to make the site useful but at the same time, I thought it would make the site memorable if the user had the oppoturnity to just watch the slideshow. So with jQuery I made the whole content div fade when the mouse isn’t around the div (the fade functionality is disabled in wonderful IE because of it’s lack of png-transparency handling)

Conclusion

The client “bought” the idea and the photoshoot. Powered by WordPress, the site is maintained by the client herself, and we’re hosting the site as well.

Below you find some screens from the final site…

Links

- Our Theia case
– Visit Theia.dk

Grab the RSS feed of these inspirational sites

- Best Web Gallery
– CSS Remix
– Design You Trust
– Website Design Awards
– Smashing Magazine

Yes, after only 6 months the old site was scrapped! The new site is based much more on ajax functionality and small animations. Project galleries have become more smooth in use and the structure and architecture of the site is now a bit more traditional.

The design in it self, is much more dark than the old. Notably to create more contrast on the project images.

A new thing is the rating and comment functionality for our projects. This means that people can comment on and rate our projects!

The more “nerdy” information is that the site is powered by WordPress, hosted at MediaTemple, runs php5 and mysql 4.1

Welcome to Mums Studio 2.0

My main areas are corporate identities, graphic concepts, web design and development. But I also work with motion, video, music and sound.

After 3,5 great years at JaHallo, I decided to go part-time and at the same time go freelance. Through my employment at JaHallo I have been lucky to work on a couple of very exciting projects which I’m grateful for. If you are interested you can take a look at my personal site Arnii.dk.

I enjoy being my own boss, and in general the life as freelancer.

At the moment, I’m working on a couple of exciting projects which I look forward to present on my website. Both of my current projects include

· Corporate identity
· Print identity
· Web design
· WP CMS
· Screen-casts / guides

Welcome to Mums!