Client’s Needs:
Five Minute Productions was approached to design and develop a full e-commerce website for BinkiBear Inc which reflected their brand and image. The core elements associated with BinkiBear are cute and cuddly while still being a sophisticated solution to a simple problem experienced by parents, keeping your child’s pacifier close to them. BinkiBear wanted a website which was open, elegant but still maintained that impression of cuteness.
Five Minute Production’s Solution:
The tricky part to this project was the dynamic extremes between “cute” and “elegant.” In general these two concepts are basically at the opposite ends of the visual spectrum. Our first gal was to capture the simple elegant concept in a nice visual web package.
We landed on a design that incorporated a simple green gradient background with a simple header image, flash on the home page and static image on the sub pages. This created an open look and feel to the site that reflected the elegant nature for which BinkiBear was looking. Also the green gradient background, though a primary and cute color, generates an overall mood to each pages design without being the stark white look which is prevalent throughout the web.
Once we had developed the basic elegant feel to the site design we then began to tackle adding the “cuteness” to the design. This was achieved by using curved boxes with a bold red outline. The red color is pulled directly from the logo and helps give the overall design a sense of unity and balance. Another way to keep it cute was by using a minimum number of boxes. As you can see to the right only the header space and the side columns have this cute “organizer box” feel to them. The center content area has no background and is framed in by the side boxes. On the home page the flash header has incorporated some very bold crayon style tabs which pull out when clicked.
Project Hurdles and Solutions:
Photography - As is often the case, photography would have a serious impact on the site design. Initially we were supplied with very basic photography that had no direction and really detracted from the overall presentation of the site. Once professional photography was taken with proper lighting and quality posing the entire look came together for the client.
Homepage Flash Header - Some time was spent coming up with an effective way to create the homepage flash header. Each main image needed to be dynamic and needed to work while the tabs on the left were fully extended. Though only two images were being used each needed to be interesting and cute enough to hold the users attention through the transition to the next. We found two images that were taken that could be right justified so that while the tabs are extend the image is still fully visible.
