Welcome to the NEW Reef Light Interactive!

Aug 04

Jeff3D, Client Spotlight, Flash, SEO, Web Design 3d web design, Reef Light Interactive No Comments

Hi all!  We’d like to welcome you to our brand new site!  We’d also like to welcome you to The Lightbox, our brand new blog.  In the coming months we’d like to use this space to talk about design trends and issues, highlight some of our new client work we’re especially proud of, and any other random thoughts that may pop into our collective heads.  We’ll try not to talk about ourselves too much, unless it provides some value or insight into the start-up experience, or gives our readers a better sense of us personally or what our company hopes to achieve.

The Re-Branding

There comes a time in every small business where they reach a cross-road.  What began as a hobby or passion has really started to take off, and your business vision is starting to materialize.  New customers/clients are contacting you every day, and it’s at that point that you need to decide how to take your business to that next level.

It’s with that in my mind that we approached our re-branding.  We’ve kept the same name – Reef Light Interactive – but that’s about it.  Our color scheme, logo, business cards, letterhead, and most importantly, our website, have all undergone a dramatic change.  These elements are all representative of what we now value:

• Exceptionally unique, quality, work
• Complex messages delivered simply

Keep these values in mind as you peruse the new site, or any of our client work.  As you’ll see, we took them seriously as we overhauled the site.

The Website Redesign

Imagery — The first thing you probably noticed was the 3D lighthouse.  We take pride in our 3D talent – rendering objects as realistically as possible, with articulate detail, and accurate lighting effects, so we wanted this to be front and center.  It not only captures a visitor’s attention, but gives a clear indication of what our specialty is.

What’s with the cubes?  Well, that’s for you to figure out.  In our first draft of the redesign, we included the red and white cubes at the base of the lighthouse, to add a twist to the image.  We showed family and friends, and without question the cube designs were polarizing.  People thought they were visually interesting, if confusing, vs. outright disliking them.  We could have easily removed them from our next iterations, but instead we’ve decided that this is a perfect representation of what we value – something exceptionally unique while visually arresting.  They were perfect.  Go ahead and explore them a bit more – - you may learn something about “the cubes”.

While we’re on lighthouses, the 2 other images that have been redesigned are our logo, and our watermark.  With these images, we wanted to carry through the look and feel of our main lighthouse, but more simply.  Be on the lookout for our watermark, which lives in the bottom right hand corner of any website we design!

Color Scheme

It’s been described as Where’s Waldo meets plastic pills…either way you look at it, the red and white jump out! With our new color scheme, we wanted to help our site really jump off the page, while still maintaining a professional look and feel.  The combination of the red and white is a perfect metaphor for our values; the red being unique and eye-catching, with the white symbolizing clarity and simplicity of our designs.

Layout

With the imagery and the colors selected for the site, we got down to the business of site architecture.  Although we had several pieces of content we wanted to communicate via our site, including our portfolio, about our company, our credentials, etc., we didn’t want to over complicate things.

With that in mind we decided on a simple top level navigation, with clear titles beginning with “Our..”, making it simple to read and understand what each site section contains.

Our sub-pages follow simple, self explanatory layouts.  Our Expertise, Story, and Awards page layout relevant information with large visuals and easy to read fonts, and Get in Touch provides an easy to use contact form.

We reserved the footer for information outside the scope of our main site navigation; including business contact information, our newsroom, recent Lightbox blog posts, and our corporate partners.

Finally, the “Our Work” page stands apart from the rest.  We encountered a challenge when designing our portfolio, as we wanted to display examples of multiple services without creating a messy user experience.  How would we display web design, flash, SEO, 3d, online strategy, print, and logo services on our site – with some clients falling into 2 if not several categories?  The solution soon appeared to us – AJAX!  Using this technology, we were able to shuffle around thumbnails all on one page, with users able to filter by service to see what we did for which clients.  A simple, yet effective technique!  Beyond that, we enabled each thumbnail to provide more information upon roll over and click, so we’ve been able to build a robust gallery in a simple to use format.

That’s all folks…

As you can see, we put a lot of thought into this redesign, as we do with all of our work.  I’ve always thought that a web design agency’s website is all you need to see to make a judgment of their quality of work.  If they don’t take their own work seriously, how can they take a clients work? In this case, it’s okay to judge a book by its cover.  We feel confident that our cover in this sense is an accurate representation of what’s inside; an agency dedicated to helping you stand apart online.