Studio10a

Challenge

STUDIO 10A is the homebase of three designers – Tom McPhillips, Mike Rhoads and Charlie Cook.  Tom is one of the pioneers of Concert Design, he is the founder of Atomic Design and with Studio 10A he’s taking production and product design to a new level.

Tom wanted a site that could showcase his extensive body of work (featuring a truly astonishing client list), enable easy addition of new portfolio pieces, news and blog items as well as  allowing clients to login to download concepts and supporting files.

The design had to give a nod to Russian Constructivism and complement the Studio10a logo which also had foundations in that era of design. Studio 10a are also based in Pennsylvania so we had the added challenge  of working with an East Coast client, however our experience of working with the Explorers Club allowed us to realise we could action a lot of work in our morning so that the client could feedback to us by our afternoon (and their morning) so that process actually worked really well for all of us. With Basecamp, iChat, Skype and VOIP lines we found very few issues with this approach.

Solution

We once again utilised Expression Engine as our CMS of choice, as this allowed us rapid development of the CMS, with some custom coding for the client area we had this up and running in a few hours. Design wise we played around with various colour schemes but because of the bright design-led style of the work we kept the site as black as it made the art work really “pop” out of the screen.

With an eye on the future of web design (and HTML5) we eschewed Flash in favour of JQuery as we felt that the site should be able to be viewed on a variety of platforms (in particular iPhones and iPads) so whereas Flash would be the obvious way to go for popups and menus JQuery gave us more flexibilty and the Portfolio section of the site works rally well when viewd on the portrait screen of an iPad.

Results

We rewrote some of the code on the portfolio section to allow for faster loading and now have a great looking site that is easy to manage, easily editable by the client and as it’s built on Expression Engine allows for rapid development changes if required.

“BRILLIANT!  LOVE IT!”

Tom

www.studio10a.tv