Corporate, Yet Classy
Some designers think that designing something for a corporate client or a corporate audience means that the bar needs to be lowered, in order for the work to appeal to the most possible people. They believe that there are sacrifices that need to be made, that the work just isn’t “as fun,” and that it’s draining, to say the least.
I disagree.
GoSmallBiz
I think that there is just as much of an opportunity to blow their minds. It just takes a different approach – a subtle one. There is a speed bump that we can call “the first impression,” and if you can manage not to freak out the users right out of the gate by presenting something that is not confusing, it allows you to flex your creative muscle under the surface. For example, with the new GoSmallBiz website, I was able to incorporate some smooth, non-intimidating animation into an otherwise clean-cut, corporate site. When you involve animation at this level, it is crucial that the animation doesn’t deliver undesired consequences, such as rollovers that do not function as the less-than-average user might expect. The simple page-turning animation at the top reinforces the fact that it is business and education-oriented, and the subtleness in turn creates an element of complexity. It also helps to increase brand recognition having the arrows visible in several areas of the interface.
3-Mentors
3-Mentors is an Insurance and Annuities company that is comprised of older men who aren’t looking for a whiz-bang experience.
Finestone & Morris Attorneys
It was a risky endeavor attempting to convince them of a large animation for navigation, and the way I was able to make that work was to make the buttons work as anybody might expect them to. This is a prime example of how to flex your creative muscles without scaring away your audience.
The website that I created for Finestone & Morris is a little different. It is a completely-flash site, which is a hard sell to an office of lawyers whose clientele is mostly comprised of older people – the kind of people who would get frustrated easily with a website that is too difficult to handle. The way to get around this was to limit the number of links on the page at any given time, and to increase the size of the hotspots. What this did was allow me to create illustrious transitional animations between each scene, without going “over the top.”
Click on the links in the top right corner of the article to view these projects.
