Hepatitis.cl is an educational website for patients and doctors about hepatitis and liver illnesses.

They wanted a website that is simple, clean, and uncluttered with clean readable fonts with easy navigation for a WordPress theme. Here’s an excerpt of what they wanted:

It should look as an informational website, not as a blog. I prefer a white background (it may have an additional color, such as gray, above and below the body). The new logo of the site is in the attached file. The logo has orange and gray, but the webpage design doesn´t have to keep that exact colors (please experiment).

Patients should be able to quickly find the specific disease or condition they are interested. This is very important. These diseases and conditions will be organized in categories and subcategories.

Note: They have since changed their design to a standard blog style 2-column layout.

Home page design

Inner page design

T3xt Sheffield is an internet marketing company, searching to begin a brand new kind of hybrid marketing site, targeted at conntecting local shop owners, restaurants and clubs having a direct audience. Their audience may be the coupon grabber, discount code seeker or somoeone similar. They’re targetting the sms marketplace for local offers, therefore the emphasis needs to greatly be about the cell phone discount code.

Here’s an excerpt of what they wanted:

Take a look at t3xt.co.uk. We have made the website already. What we are looking for is a complete design of the index page to make this page come alive and really look good.

What we need is for you to take what is there and jazz it up big time. Leaving all the boxes, search bars, tabs etc all in the same place. Just a complete overhaul of what’s there.

Home Page Design

RBS Accountants Limited is a London Dockland’s based chartered accountant firm. They were looking a fresh web design for their site to be able to improve their image. They wanted a site that is fresh and dynamic to cater for business people looking for chartered accountants.

Here’s an excerpt of what they wanted

Colour pallet – Contemporary colour pallet to look fresh and dynamic to do business with.

Screen size – The site will need to fit 1024px width display. Where possible avoid too much scrolling of the page content. To help reduce scrolling the content, pages could use tabs if the content allows.

Dynamic elements – No flash animation but we are happy use JavaScript to for dynamic elements.

Clear call to actions – The site template design needs to have clear call to actions, these are:

Display of the phone number
How can we help?
Newsletter signup

Home page design

Inner Page Design

]]> http://gdtdesignstudio.com/portfolio-rbs-accountants-limited/feed/ 0 http://gdtdesignstudio.com/crowd-sourcing-%e2%80%93-the-pros-and-cons/ http://gdtdesignstudio.com/crowd-sourcing-%e2%80%93-the-pros-and-cons/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:40:15 +0000 gdtdesign http://gdtdesignstudio.com/?p=153

In the traditional business model, the employer will hire the services of a contractor or if they’re on a tight budget they’ll hire a freelancer for a project. A meeting is set up to discuss the details, and if both parties agree on the terms and rate – they sign a contract and proceed on with the project until its completion.

That was then this is now…

The employer opens a contest with all the details of the project then enters the amount of the prize; freelancers enter and submit their entries hoping that their entry is selected as the winner. In the last step, all entries are reviewed and after several rounds of revisions a winner is selected. Sounds fun right?

A lot of Crowd Sourcing sites have been launched in the past 4 years mostly in the graphic design industry that I’m part of – 99designs, crowdSPRING, and PimTim to name a few. These sites operate on a Crowd Sourcing principle – the employer asks a group of people to perform a task without any guarantee of compensation until a winner has been chosen.

There’s a lot of debate regarding Crowd Sourcing – there are people who say that this kills the industry because of the low market price, that the contractors are taking advantage of people joining these contests, getting ideas and mockups without any compensation aside from the winner.

On the other side, these contests are big opportunities for newbies to get their feet wet in the industry, a freelancer’s chance to earn a good living – especially for those living in developing countries, and also to build a credible portfolio and a customer base which is extremely important.

Which side are you on?

I’m a believer in this, not only the opportunities it presents, but because it helps a lot of people. Not everyone will have the opportunity of finding first world clients who’ll pay above average rates for a potential project.

This is not for everyone, a freelancer will have to be extremely patient and be a sponge to soak up all the knowledge and experience from every contest they join and apply all that they’ve have learned in future contests. If they don’t have that patience and drive, I’m sorry to say that failure is imminent.

For businesses, I don’t think this is for them, I’ve seen a couple of them try and eventually give up because of the time needed in every contest in order to be successful.

What’s the success rate?

Typically on average 10% (1 win for every 10 contests joined) is pretty decent – I’ve seen a handful of really talented designers who have a 30% – 50% success rate which is pretty remarkable, but that’s the exception rather than the norm.

Should freelancers join?

Like what I said earlier, this is not for everyone, but if you’re starting out, this is the perfect venue for you to hone your skills and build your portfolio. Don’t worry about the prize, the better you become the money will follow.

I hope this article will give you an idea about crowd sourcing – the pros and cons, now it’s up to you to decide if you want to try it out. The information I’ve shared is based on personal experience from joining contests – 411 and counting. Please feel free to send me a message if you have any questions or just want to comment on this topic.

Cheers.

Xenon Warranties offers insurance coverage to car owners whose cars’ are equipped with HID. They wanted a premium, extremely high quality, high dollar type design for their website.

Here’s an excerpt of what they wanted:

The overall website background should be something dark, and the background for the webpage itself something light. Colors to use silver, navy blue, black

Design Highlights:

• Subtle use of gradients and textures.
• The use of Projector headlamps on both sides of the logo, you know right away that this website is about HID Lighting.
• Clear and easy to use navigation.
• Car brands are clearly defined with the use of photos.

Homepage Design

“Social and Cultural Studies Mainz” (SOCUM) is the name of a project launched jointly by a group of academic researchers. It is supported (and sponsored) by the university and the ministry of education. Such projects usually last 3-5 years but could reach a permanent status. A central aim is to promote interdisciplinary research.

Here’s an excerpt of what they wanted:

We like clear designs with a fresh and modern look. No color theme decision yet, but it should match the logo, while we prefer light over dark. We rely on your creativity! Whitespace is key (no heavy news site).

After finalizing the design, I was then commissioned to convert and optimize this for WordPress.

Homepage Design

Inner Page Design

The International Studienkolleg of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany) is a preparatory facility which aims to prepare prospective students with foreign school-leaving certification for specific university major courses of study.

They wanted a website that is clear and concise with a fresh and modern look with a good amount of whitespace.

Here’s an excerpt of what they wanted for the design:

We like clear and concise designs with a fresh and modern look. No color theme decision yet, while we prefer a lively design using lucid color and images. We rely on your creativity! Whitespace is key. I will give some favourite example sites later. Keep in mind, that our students love social networking (Facebook et.al.). Nice icons and Web 2.0 features (e.g. RSS) could be considered. We prefer sophisticated over too much bells and whistles.

Design Highlights:

• Clear and easy to use navigation
• Clear Call-to-Action
• Sections are clearly defined

After the design was approved, they commissioned me to make the HTML/CSS conversion optimized for WordPress as their main Content Management System (CMS).

Homepage Design

Inner Page Design

Currently DNCentral.com is not active at the moment, the purpose of this post is just to showcase the design work I did for DNCentral a couple of years ago.

Here’s a brief description of what they want:

1. We need the design to be clean, with a nice distribution and no excess use of colors.
2. Use Repetition in your design. For example in our hand-drawing, you can see that the lower part of the page is split into 6 equally sized blocks that represent different auction sections. The upper part is made of a double-sized block and another smaller block which is as big as the rest of the small blocks.
3. In our Hand-drawing we tried to fit all the buttons we needed on the navigation bar, so we figured out that we would design two rows instead of one. In the top row we inserted the informational buttons, and in the second row we put the buttons that we want to use as drop-down menus when the visitor hovers his mouse over them. We used the repetition principle here as well, making the buttons on each row equally sized.

Homepage Design

Other Pages

BBR is a Bulgarian based company that offer large variety of upholstery fabrics, curtains etc. They were looking for a talented designer to give their website a fresh look – they wanted a clean, simple and usable design.

Here’s an brief description of what they want:

The positive approach and focus on individual needs of customer should somehow be projected in the overall look & feel of the site. Some common characteristics are:
– PERSONAL TOUCH, FRIENDLY – not a big impersonal warehouse
– LARGE VARIETY – (high-quality western upholstery fabrics, curtains, bedcovers etc *in stock*)
– NO Online-Store – rather a catalogue (without prices). From the site people should get enticed to call by phone or visit the shop.
– PLENTY PHOTOS and SAMPLES will be featured on the site to display current models.

Desired Style
– FUNCTIONAL, CLEAN, EASY TO NAVIGATE – (NO drop-down menu items etc)
– FLAT I prefer “flat” look, with skillful use of borders, backgrounds and shades. There might be the occasional 3D element, like a button etc, to draw extra attention at key areas.
– WordPress info This design will be incorporated into WordPress and will need to be coded as much as possible with CSS in order to make it “light” and quick to load. Therefore, keep CSS limitations in mind.
– NO POP-UP WINDOWS
– Conveys a professional image (not cheesy)

Color:
Up to you, but keep in mind a “friendly” and “fabric-like” look.

Design Highlights:

• Subtle use of gradients and texture
• Simple and easy to use navigation

Home page Design

Other pages

Crazy Custom Caps makes custom baseball hats, allowing their customers to design their own caps online. With over 30,000 visitors a month they needed a major makeover.

Here’s what they wanted for their website:

we need a new exciting look, our customers are aged 15-60, our website is ranked number 1 in google and we are one of the top online personalised cap sites around so we want to fix the design to project that. the site NEEDS to look FUN, cool, exciting, simple with no clutter. Dont forget our customers are also tradesman, business owners, as well, not just teenagers/skaters.

Design highlights:

• I wanted a different look for the menu so I extended it beyond the width of the page and added a shadow below it to make it pop, badges beside the logo were designed by a fellow designer who won 2nd place in the contest.
• Subtle use of gradients and shadows.
• Clear CTA to relay the message to potential customers.
• Bright colors that complement each other.

Home page with the focus on the CTAs >> “Make your own custom cap!” and “Make your exciting cap in 3 simple steps”

Other web pages designed