A2 Design Studio

I recently bought a Domain name called A2designstudio.co.uk because when I went to buy designersondemand.co.uk it was taken. I learnt a valuable lesson to buy the domain you want ASAP before somebody else takes it. 

The name A2 design studio comes from me and my friend Adam having the same first letter in out first name and there being two of us, simple. So I went through a small process of designing a few logos to suit us heres a few...

I like the logo on the right but I wanted the logo to site at the top of the page on my site therefore this wouldn't work as an animation to start my site off.






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 The above logo is my final choice of the 3 I designed. The reason for this is because I think the logo is clever and has lot of room to make a nice animation. Just incase you don't see that the logo says A2 design the A and D are all apart of the first A in the name the 2 is both the number 2 and is also slightly tilted to make an E.

I have kept the layout nice and simple to make the work on the portfolio page stand out and any bits of animation standout also.

This was the first homepage design all centred and the illustrations do a little animation, which is obviously at the start it says we love design but the rest is about showing how you get and idea that you love you write it down and your away, which is why the pencil flies off the screen. I will also add that I have took the illustrations from earlier designs that you might recognise from designers on demand.

This shot on the left is the final homepage layout and as you can see there is a animation of some work coming on the screen whihc I chose to do because if it was just the illustration at the start then people might not like what they see and might go straight off the site without viewing any other pages whihc is why I did this to give viewers a taster to want to go on to the portfolio page.

I am going to show you a few screen shots of the different pages on my site before I got to the final chosen pages.

This was the first services page. I tried to keep fluent look throughout by using the illustrations again from the home page.

This is my final services page, the services all animate quickly before sitting still.

This is the first portfolio page layout, centred in the middle with now real structure so I made the whole website left aligned.

Each image loads in on a quick fade and originally I chose to use 30 pieces of work but later decided to bring it down to 15 pieces of work as you will see in the next shot.

Plan

Yes:

Facebook

·       I want to use Facebook purely because most people use it and you can advertise your business on there. Everybody has it unlike Twitter which is slowly becoming more popular but not as easy to use as Facebook. Also Facebook has options to create pages which are seen as fan pages where you get so many people liking your page. Another reason I want to use Facebook on my site is because it’s very easy for people to recommend you as a quality company through word of mouth and the fact that Facebook is linked to most other networking sites.

• ·         One of the largest networking sites – potentially the biggest client base

• ·         Almost every business nowadays uses Facebook

Deviant art

• I am going to use Deviant art on my site because it’s a place where lots of professionals go to post up there work and it gives you the option to comment on peoples work. It will also work best for me to have a Deviant art page set up because when people view the work they can blow it up to a large size where as I haven’t gave the option to view the work on my site large.

 No:

Twitter

• I am not really a big fan of Twitter I don’t feel it is very professional even though there are millions of famous people using it. The site is purely comment based and a lot of effort to keep people interested and without being able to show off your work it seems to me to be quite pointless using it when Facebook does everything Twitter does.

A lot more people use Facebook over Twitter because it is easier to use and is more popular as it’s been out longer than Twitter and I think Twitter is only trying to copy Facebook. There is no point having two of the same type of social networking sites where you have followers on one site which is just duplicated on the other site.

Linked in

• At the moment the two above networking sites are enough to handle as linked in is for established businesses where if a2 design were on there we would look amateur which wouldn’t be a good starting point for a starter business. A2 design need to build a client base before extending the amount of networking we do so there is no sites linked through our site left not up to date. 

I feel that more than two networking sites would be too much to manage when just starting up a business the amount of hard work and dedication it takes to set up a business it would be way to time consuming. There is two people who are apart of a2design therefore two networking sites is just enough.

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Between me and Adam we have had the chance to work with alot of big public sector names but all of which during employment.

Due to the way I have chosen to do my website as a company and not as a personal portfolio I thought I would design some business cards even though it is too early to have business cards without any professional help making our business plan etc...

As it is a requirement to show how your going to get yourself noticed or your site noticed I thought it would be a good idea to make a letter explaining that I am a new up coming business etc and give the people I send the letter to a business card attached heres an example below.