The house that gm-design built

All projects begin with a need, a need to increase sales, a need to promote awareness, or perhaps a need to provide information.

You take this need to a blank canvas, you reintroduce any necessary existing elements or considerations and then you work to create a solution. This solution is then in turn interrogated, tested and tweaked.

Ideas will have been explored and rejected, shot down in flames in the process of seeking excellence; from the ashes, the perfect proverbial Phoenix emerges.

Design is subjective, the real creative intelligence lies in creating something that fits the brief, addresses the need and generates a return on the investment.

We undertook the re-launch of our new site in this exact same way.

The need; showcase our work so that the work is the primary focus, not the overall design of the site. We create designs and solutions to meet a wide range of business needs; from website recovery to logo design, it was important for us to create an environment where these could stand side-by-side comfortably.

Like a photographer, our designs carry a sense of our style and identity, but they are more reflective of the respective subject and project. What better way to showcase them than a photographer’s backdrop; a beautiful clean blank canvas where the story can tell itself.

With this as a concept, we then began to consider the placement of elements such as the navigation that we wanted to feature in the site.

When looking at a something like a webpage, the eye will come to rest on the right hand side for the majority of people, it’s completely natural, and the reason that we have placed our clean, crisp primary navigation and sharing tabs on the right hand side; encouraging you to explore deeper through our site.

That, in a nutshell, is the logic behind the overall look and feel of our site; a subtle, clean gallery where our designs can speak for themselves without any background interference, supported by eloquent, informative textual explanations.