Today is a very special day for me for several reasons. Looks like the planets aligned bringing a blow of changes. It is not exactly a change but yesterday the elections were celebrated in Spain and the conservative party didn’t win, which for me is a reason to be very happy. This morning my old car was taken to the cemetery. Also, this morning I got a letter from the U.S. embassy with an appointment for an interview for my VISA, which is another wonderful news because Naomi and I want to move this year. But the most important change is the one about my Web Consultation Studio Intuitive Designs. This morning we have just released the new site redesign, the 6th version we’ve had since we started the firm more than 5 years ago.
Naomi and I have been working in the new design for the last two months, scratching out every free minute to be able to complete it and now it is live. For this new version, we decided to just be ourselves and nothing but ourselves. We have ended up with a design that we think doesn’t have a lot to do with most of the web site designs you see around. It has been influenced mostly by things that we love not only in our profession, but in our personal life as well. The illustrations for instance have been mostly influenced by vintage advertisements from the 50′s and 60′s.
In the former version of Intuitive Designs, we decided to use an analogy with something that could be compared to web design as a service, something we would love in a personal level. So we used this idea of being cooks, because both of us love to cook in our spare time. The idea was pretty fun and worked very well visually, but it didn’t quite represent the most important message of Intuitive Designs today. A message that would really define the basic spirit of the firm. And the message today is this: “Here your vision becomes reality”.
One of the decisions which was hard to make was to include our own caricatures in the site. We wanted to show an image of ourselves just the way we are but on the other hand we didn’t want to give too much importance to ourselves. We finally decided to do these illustrations that represent us in a vague way. One of the problems for me to do the caricatures is that if I wanted to make them appear alike it wouldn’t really fit the vintage cartoon style of the illustrations. So I decided to sacrifice that in order to keep a coherent style. The result is that these two guys in the illustration just have a resemblance to us and they cannot be taken as portraits. Naomi, for instance, is a lot taller than me, but I think it works fine with the overall style and still our spirit is there, which is the most important.
I have enjoyed very much doing this set of illustrations. I always wanted to be able to use this kind of vintage cartoonish style for a project of our own and when we saw the opportunity and decided to go for what would stand for our own, I was really excited. I’m a fan from the advertisement design from the 50′s and 60′s, I consider that some of the best works from designers, publicists and illustrators from this period haven’t been properly credited, and I think there is still a lot to learn from it and a lot of inspiration to apply to the modern web design.
