Charles Elena Design is a design studio specialising in corporate branding and brand management for both online and print media. I found their website while browsing a CSS gallery and instantly realised why it was in their, the design is great and I wanted to tell you why I thought so.
The first thing that caught my eye was the huge bold heading “Creative Engaging Branding”, this instantly tells the reader exactly what the company specialize in.
To the right of this great looking title is a slideshow of recent work from the agency, giving anyone interested an idea of the style of work they produce and the sort of clients they have worked with. I particularly like the way the work slides in using an array of different techniques, making it interesting throughout. It would have been very easy to put the same transition on every slide but I’m glad they put a little extra effort in to make them all different.
I know the Charles Elena Design site uses a very commonly seen colour scheme of Red, White, Grey and Black but they have used it to great effect throughout the site to give the whole thing a very striking impact.
Every section in the site has a different background colour making each unique, with the supporting colours used expertly to give hierarchy to the page. The pages with the red background are my personal favourite.
I really love the use of huge graphics throughout the site, these are very much in-line with the big bold headings on every page. There are more and more sites online these days incorporating massive font and graphics and Charles Elena Design is a great example of why. As you travel down the page you are treated to some lovely shapes that really show off the agencies skills.
One point I would make though is that the speed at which the page scrolls down means that these graphics are shown too briefly in my opinion. While you can scroll to the graphics and take them in properly it wouldn’t hurt to slow down the scroll speed.
While I’m suggesting improvements that could possibly be made I’d like to highlight the very small copy font that is used on occasion. In the example above the copy font size is 10.67px which is very small for such a long paragraph of text. I would love to see this bumped up a pixel or two because it’s currently very hard to read.
One final improvement I would love to see would concern the presentation of their portfolio. They have used a scrolling carousel to display their work, which in my opinion, is difficult to use as it makes focusing on specific work very fiddly. An option to scroll through the work one by one would be my preference.
Also, their is currently no way to enlarge the work on offer. I’d love to have the chance to open their work up in a lightbox and see it in all it’s glory.
I don’t want to seem too negative here though because overall I really love this site and think it’s a great piece of work. With that in mind, I want to now go onto my favourite design feature on the site, the fixed logo and navigation. As you take a journey down the page the logo and navigation come with you staying in a fixed position on your screen.
This may not seem special but the designers of the site have thought about this journey and incorporated the logo into the background graphics. In the example above the logo merges with the curved graphic to make it look as if the curve is bleeding out. There are numerous examples of this as you go down the page and it is small touches like this that, in my opinion, makes sites stand out from the crowd.
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alexpeterson
