Website: By George!
By George! is a project being run by the City of Sydney as an attempt to "to enliven the City's laneways and forgotten spaces". The plan is to create installations in a number of Sydney's small laneways by interdisciplinary teams later on in the year. This website is currently an introduction to the project, and a call for submissions by teams with their ideas for what can be done.
This site is, in my opinion, a perfect example of what architecture firms and projects should be doing with their websites. From a technical standpoint it is a good combination of plain html and css along with flash for some of the more interactive components. This draws on the advantages of both technical aspects. The plain html and css makes for a more accessible, usable and search engine friendly, while the flash components provide a slicker interface, and a bit of "wow" factor.
From a design perspective, the site has a very modern feel - quite fitting for the art/arch/design target market the project would be looking to get in touch with. The site carries a dark theme throughout with headings and text pulled out in white and hot pink. Pink contrast so beautifully against the dark background, and combines nicely with the b/w photo on the homepage especially.
From a layout perspective the site follows a nice grid and is split neatly into either 2 or 4 even columns. Nice and organised, simple and easy to read. This provides consistency in appearance to the pages, whether they be an introduction, a table of locations, or biographies.
The By George! logo is a typeface composed of arranged circles, reminiscent of city lights. The circles are a theme carried throughout the site, in other icons and headings. This a great example of a simple theme/technique that provides consistency and continuity through the whole site.
By George! looks set to be an extremely interesting project, and this is a great site. Many firms could learn a lot about the right approach to a website by taking a look through. The right combination of technologies, a memorable and simple design, and just enough pizazz add up to a fantastic final product.
Design + Build | By George! Laneways said...
[...] you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!The projects for By George! (Hidden Networks, Forgotten Systems) have been announced and you can find out more about them here. [...]