Usually, when it comes to designing a new website, we recommend you should look to get a brand new website every three to five years, depending on how well its performs. After-all, Your website is your digital representation of yourself and your business, so it’s important that you keep up with trends, and ensure it’s performing as well as it could. As digital designers, you would think making our own website would be something we could do in no-time at all. But with us dedicating most of our time and energy to clients and their projects, there hasn’t been much time over the last year to make sure we’re practicing what we preach. However, without further ado, introducing our brand new website!
The Brand
As cliché as it sounds, our branding has gone through more of an evolution than a revolution. Our core values are still very much intact, as we continue to strive to represent ourselves as a dynamic, innovative digital agency, with strong connections to our clients, and the skills and expertise to consistently deliver both quality and value.
However, that hasn’t stopped us changing our visual branding, adding red tones into the previously orange/yellow logo. As a result, we’ve created a flame-like gradient that’s slowly replacing the shards of our earlier design, incorporating itself into not only our logo, but across a variety of elements across our branding. We wanted to keep things simpler, cleaner and more modern, but with a touch of a new colour to breathe a sense of vibrancy and add new life to our now four year old branding.
The shards of our previous branding has also seen an evolution, as the shards have broken into small stars and particles, with star constellations and geometric shapes, orbiting around our logo.
Kino through the ages
This image below shows our brand evolution over the last twenty years. How things have changed!
The Website
Our previous website redesign had seen us pull together multiple ideas into a single thread of interactivity. Since we create projects that engages and involves a user at multiple levels, we wanted our website to uphold this standard, in a way that’s both fun and entertaining, but most importantly practical. Through creating and utilising subtle, lightweight animations on various pages of the brand new website that would draw a visitors attention without distracting from the content and information we wanted them to see.
Our previous website’s homepage featured an interactive center-piece in the form of the shards. They were the first thing visitors would see when they landed on our homepage, and offered a playful interactive element, that offered a unique “wow-factor” we hoped would enable us to stand out.
For our new website we built on this idea of an interactive landing page, with out new constellations theme. Immediately upon landing on our homepage, visitors will be greeted with the Kino Creative constellation logo, whilst a range of stars and particles float before gradually fading away like stars. If you look closely, we’ve even added small geometric shapes, floating around our logo. Each shape represents a different service, with the triangle representing animation, the square for digital, and the pentagon for print, and each can be clicked transporting you to another page to find out more about our three core services.
Compared to our earlier homepage, visitors to our new site are immediately presented with who we are, the services we offer, our contact details, and the clients we work with, without the need to navigate elsewhere on our page.
Refreshed Navigation
Our previous website featured a pop-out/drop down Menu, which whilst it kept the navigation for the site hidden and out the way, it may have been a little bit too hidden. Our brand new website doesn’t get rid of the hidden menu, but instead introduces a new sticky menu at the top of the screen. This new menu style will enable visitors to see at a glance the different services we offer, and quickly access the information they need – whether that’s contact details, examples of our work, or a shortcut back to our homepage.
Cleaner, more streamlined experience
When it comes down to it, most of our website has remained the same. Our biggest focus has been on refining what we’d previously built into something that’s cleaner, and a more streamlined experience. When a visitors comes to our website, we want them to be able to do two things. One, we want them to see immediately exactly who we are and what we can do. And two, we want visitors to be able to find exactly what they’ve come to our website for as quickly as possible.
Introducing… animation cost calculator
As one of the three core services clients come to us for, animation is something we talk about a lot, and we want our clients and customers to understand our pricing strategy when it comes to how much animation costs. We want to be transparent with our clients, and we want you to understand immediately how much your next animation project will cost.
So…
Whilst our brand new website isn’t the huge step up we’ve taken previously, we’re all very proud of how it’s turned out. It was a long over-due process, but we think the new look is something that should keep up appearances until 2021 (hopefully!).
So see what we’ve done, and let us know what you think!