Old Muffin Studio is an indie game development team. It’s partially my own project as I work as a lead (and only) designer there. We needed a logo that would reflect the studio’s character so it had to be something funny and simple. Also, it had to be easy to use in promotional materials. As the Studio’s name suggests, a good starting point would be to create a custom character.

The Solution:

It was a real pleasure to design this one – mostly because I had complete freedom of artistic expression. I decided to go with quite obvious solution and drew a friendly looking muffin character. To make it look a little bit old (as the name suggests), I gave him a monocle and that big white grandpa-mustache. The last thing to do was to add the title – to keep the style, I made it look like a speech baloon.

You can check the completed project here.

In both languages. That makes it 106 descriptions to fill or correct. But thanks to this, now my portfolio is finally “complete” – there are no more “soon to be written” information and there won’t be any ever again as every new project published here now always comes with all of the necessary info.

Change of my hosting provider

Goodbye JustHost.com, welcome Net-Art (big Polish hosting provider and domain registrar).

The reasons? Primarily the speed – I just couldn’t stand waiting each time I refreshed page. Sometimes it took over 10 seconds for the page to load which was quite a pain. As I try to focus my services on US and Northern Europe, I thought having a foreign hosting for my website could make navigating through the site more comfortable for people from those areas. But as I started getting negative information about the loading times, I knew I had to move everything to somewhere else.

So I did – I hope everything runs much faster now.

Work with one of the biggest charity foundations in Poland

As for now, I don’t want to disclose too much information but I can say that I’m redesigning their main website and – if everything go well – I’ll be probably taking care of their other project sites in the nearest future.

Start of my new indie games project

I always wanted to make indie games and I finally managed to make something towards achieving that goal. Please welcome:

with it’s website under construction, oldmuffin.com. Currently you won’t find much on it but stay tuned. As for now, I can say that there’s two of us behind this project – me and my old pal, Maciej. I take care of the designing and he makes magical things visible only under the hood.

We already started working on one project. If we manage to make it at least somehow playable, we’ll definitely create a dedicated devlog on the Studio’s website where you’ll be able to check the progress on the on-going basis.

Wish us good luck!

A8 Architektura is an architectural studio from Warsaw, Poland, that designs houses, interiors and commercial buildings. For the purpose of rebranding, I was asked to design and develop its new website. The new site had to primarily focus on the list of benefits of collaboration with the studio and emphasize its individual approach to each customer and order. The company has considerable experience – it’s done many projects and received very good testimonials. It was appreciated in many design competitions and also received an award for being a “staff-friendly company”. All of these qualities and values had to be highlighted in the new version of the site in a simple way that is effective in its reception by the site visitors, yet easy to manage from content management system. This required some planning how to organize the logical structure of information and how to design and implement an appropriate navigation system.

The Solution

The project required a comprehensive analysis of the needs and a good preparation – because of the amount of content and the scope of work, the layout planning stage was essential. I designed a detailed set wireframes on the basis of I developed the graphical appearance. The design was created to provide good legibility and visibility of key elements. Large fonts and logically planned hierarchy of information makes the content easy to read and assimilate. The navigation is flat and comfortable to use – it helps users to navigate the site intuitively. All data contained on the site – pages, project lists, award lists, testimonials – are organized in separate groups (custom post types and taxonomies) in the WordPress content management system. Most processes associated with frequently performed administrative work, such as adding new work to the portfolio, were automated, which greatly accelerates and simplifies the management.

You can check the completed project here or see it directly in my portfolio.

This is how the original website looked:

Identifying needs

Client’s expectations of style and form of the new website’s content presentation were perfectly clear from the beginning. The new project had to most of all:

• encourage clients to try denture repairs by mail order,
• in the future, make them buy new dentures in the Clinic,
• have more exclusive, prestige character – so that visitors will know that they are dealing with professionals with a sense of taste,
• from the moment the page is displayed, inform the newcomers about several service options: repair by mail order, on-site or possible new denture creation,
• keep the current content and general layout,
• keep both language versions, accessible from two top-level domains,
• with its graphical style refer to the current website of the Clinic.

So the general assumption for this project was to partially left the previous form of the content presentation untouched and improve the rest of the site by expanding it, adding new information and complete redesign of the visual style.

Developing prototype of the new website

I started my work from preparing a wireframe of the website – a proposition of its elements layout. This prototype can be seen live – just click the image below (the link will open in a new window):

The changes primarily affected the informational part – the old website was based on a single-page layout, without any additional content except for what could be seen directly after opening the page in web browser. I wanted to keep that single-page simplicity while adding more distinct division between services.

For that purpose I used three big tabs that by themselves contain short information about the available services. By clicking on a tab, the content visible below it changes without any need to refresh the page. It helps and speeds up access to information.

I also changed the graphical presentation of the denture repairs by mail order process – the layout of the steps was reorganized so the whole process can be more approachable and understandable for the potential customer.

As the client requested to remove two out of four questions and answers from the question list visible at the bottom of the old page, the remaining two could be reorganized into two adjacent columns, with the answers visible. Previously you had to click on the chosen question to see the answer – now both of them are instantly available.

Changing the visual style – designing new graphics

I prepared the news design based on the client’s request to make it match the current website of the Clinic (here’s also a screenshot in case the original website changes in the future). All of the elements important to the viewer were presented in color so that they stand out from the rest of the website’s objects (e.g. “Pay with PayPal” buttons).

Because of the very diverse age of the target group, the website consists of big sized font, clear, sharp letters and highlights of the most significant information.

Big white tabs on the black background immediately attract attention and impart the presence of three different types of services with their prices and vital info. Green border with an arrow points out the rest of the tab’s text and let the user distinguish which tab is active at the moment.

The website was also enriched with high quality prosthetic denture photos.

For the purpose of the mail-order repair services process’ presentation, based on the old concept, I designed new icons showing the different stages. With their simple form and usage of only one color, they fit the rest of the site and do not interfere with its elegant character.

Coding and implementing the content management system

The last stage was to cut the design into HTML and CSS code and then implement the Content Management System. For the CMS, I chose the most recent version of WordPress.

To keep things easy to edit and manage (considering the fact, that the whole thing is single-page only), all parts of the website that contain text were divided into different sections available from administration panel:

Thanks to that solution, changing each block of text is easy and quick as you are editing only a small part of the whole website, not everything at once. Content edition is managed by simple to use editor:

Bilingual nature of the site is provided by WPML plug-in that makes all of the page content have additional translations. While editing any fragment of the site, small window on the right provides easy access to edit its translation or to import it to the currently edited section.

Thanks to WPML, adding more language versions of the site in the future won’t be of any problem. The plug-in also allowed me to easily set up the website to display different language versions depending on the URL it was displayed from.

Finishing touches and summary

The last thing I did was to add tab functionality and simple top bar animation through Javascript and jQuery library. When the user clicks on “Pay with PayPal” button, a small window slides in from the top of the page, providing a chance to choose payment options. It works just like in the old website, except this time the animation is smooth, not just an instant pop-up.

After testing out how the website works on the non-public test server (by myself and my client), everything was transfered to its final hosting place and published. Both language versions of the site are available from URLs:

• denturesrepairs.co.uk – for english version,
• naprawaprotez.co.uk – for polish version.

You can also check out the project itself in my portfolio.

A private denture clinic asked me to redesign its current website that promotes denture repairs services by mail order. The client’s expectations about the visual style and content presentation form evolved over time and so existing solution became insufficient. The new website had to not only convince clients to repair their dentures by mail order but also make them order their new dentures from the clinic in the future. The design had to look more exclusively, so the visitors will know that they’re dealing with professionals with a sense of taste. The client wanted the site created in a way that at first sight informs the newcomers about several service options: repair by mail order, on-site or possible new denture creation.

The solution

The main assumption for this project was to partially left the previous form of the content presentation untouched and improve the rest of the site by expanding it, adding new information and completely redesign the visual style. The graphic design, as the client suggested, is visually based on the current website of the clinic that provides the denture repair services. The page content is divided into 3 fields – repairs by mail order, repairs on-site and information about the clinic. Each field is accessible by big tabs that are visible the moment the site is displayed. Because of that, each new visitor immediately notices the different service options. The website is single-page only so the time to access any of its parts is greatly reduced.

You can check the completed project here or see it directly in my portfolio.

1. Necessity – there was obviously no deadline but I just had to start using some kind of professional signature.
2. Well thought out concept – before I officially started my own business, I’ve been thinking a lot about my logo and the rest of the company ID.

it wasn’t that easy with the website. Mainly because of a fact that – already having experience in designing my own portfolio and seeing very clearly all of the mistakes that I’d made while designing it – this time I wanted to develop my own company’s website in such a way that even after a week, month or a year I’ll still be able to tell myself: “you did a great job, keep expanding it”.

Now, after I decided to publish this website even though I know it still lacks some content, I can without a doubt say: it was well worth it.

Magical 160 hours – summary

I “officially” started working on the website on Aug 2nd 2011. Since then, assuming that my time tracking software is working correctly (Toggl.com – soon to be reviewed here), I spent approximately 160 hours of efficient work – including the time I spent on briefing myself, analysis, concept sketches, learning things on the fly, etc. Those magical 160 hours are pretty much like a normal day job month (4 weeks * 5 days * 8 hours).

What have I managed to achieve by now? Among other things:

• Completely changed the way I brief my clients – twice. I also prepared new template of the brief.
• Invented my own work methodology.
• Started using tools for wireframing (prototyping) – until then I didn’t need them, usually a pencil and a piece of paper worked. Now – despite the fact that traditional media are still pretty useful – I simply cannot imagine my job without having an ability to design wireframes digitally. It’s just absolutely great convenience. I’m currently using  iPlotz – review coming soon.
• Finally collected, sorted and prepared for this portfolio total of 51 projects.
• Learned a lot of new things, such as: writing web scripts in JavaScript, implementing WPML plugin for making sites multilingual, designing WordPress templates in a clever way and completely from scratch.

And a lot more. In the meantime I came across lots of different difficulties and traps, about which I’ll certainly write soon, while preparing a Creo Ignis case study.

What still needs some work? Above all:

• The site still lacks a lot of project descriptions - I’ll be adding them on an ongoing basis, each day describing and translating new ones.
  
• The site was not publicly tested (how could it be anyway), so there still might be some bugs and errors that I didn’t caught during the testing phases.
• There’s not even a single case study – simply put, I won’t be able to prepare it if I want to publish the site still in 2011.

There might be more to point out. But the thing is, it’s not that important as those are really just a minor problems when you look at them from the perspective of the whole project. I’ll fix them before the end of January 2012.

New Year resolutions, i.e. “what’s next?”

First of all – development. Both of self and of this site. The year 2011 changed a lot in my life – especially its professional part. What lessons I learned are soon to be described along with the new blog post. As for now, I’ll just briefly point out what will probably happen in the nearest future with my personal brand, Creo Ignis:

• I’ll add news case studies here – especially self analysis, that is why Creo Ignis is what it is, what goals and challenges I faced while designing this brand and what I did to meet them (next years will verify if I really did).
• I’ll complete all project descriptions.
• I’ll add materials to Creo Ignis Facebook fanpage – feel free to Like it.
• I’ll add materials to Creo Ignis Behance profile.
• I’ll write some reviews of the software I use in my job on a daily basis.

And finally, I’ll create a new, this time personal, website, focused on presenting my artwork created as a hobby and my personal posts, not connected with my job.

In conclusion – of this post and Year 2011

…I’d like to wish everyone – my Clients, as well as my coworkers, business partners and every single designer out there – Happy New Year 2012. Let it be full of successes – both private and professional! May it result in lots of new great ideas and for its entire duration, may everyone have tons of inspiration and motivation!

Until the next entry!

PS. I encourage you to like Creo Ignis fanpage on Facebook and to follow it on Twitter – those are the first places where I post information about news, comments, design related links, etc.