Reiterated — the Thoughts behind Our New Design

As a designer, you’re always looking to upgrade and make things better. It’s a constant pursuit for ways to improve experiences, enhance usability and while doing so, make things prettier.

After joining Folkmatic in December, I couldn’t help but point out some challenges we had with the previous site and I convinced the team to do a minor update. Which, of course, grew into a complete design overhaul.

In our work with clients we always take a principled stance. This opportunity presented us a chance to put our ideology into action and act as our own counterpart.

The purpose: Our personal voice, our red thread, our strict style

The primary objective; that the new solution should do better than the previous one, was to communicate a stronger sense of who we are — with a personal touch.

In addition, the solution should be clearer in conveying the core ideas behind each of our cases and knit them together for greater interrelationships.

Not least, the design should showcase what we stand for today, with a tighter grid, strong typography, better transitions and general performance.

The approach: Pattern-based dogma meets subtle randomness

As referenced by Marcotte, design thinking must adapt to a flexible methodology, where there’s no “proper” resolution to experience from. Instead, we must think in patterns and modules and attune the content to this approach.

Following a mobile mindset first, the initial step was to lay out the framework grid and place the corresponding elements into it. This provided us with the structure to build upon.

Now we needed the “chaos” to disturb the order. This is where we came up with the idea of the ‘random greeting’ that meets you at first glance (hit refresh on the landing page). With an option to create prioritized sentences and thereby comment on current topics.

The link between Folkmatic and each of our cases was solved with a sleek transition from colored block onto a matching color fade-in to the actual case page, thereby bridging the experience from overview to detail.

The result: Ideal experience across any resolution

The new site is snappy, clean and light without the design being compromised. With careful exploration, we updated our use of typography to a font that’s well designed, clean and readable on all screens and platforms.

A baseline grid is applied on each page to ensure that the readability is on point, without any “nervous unbalancing” effects. For this specific case, we applied a 6-pixel baseline grid. The different colors are assigned to each of the cases and contribute with a playful, clean and simple feel.

Our neat iconic illustrations were given a touch of animation to make them come alive. Continuing the simple approach, photography became an extension of the design instead of being its main focus point.

We’re thrilled to have this launched and appreciate any feedback.