Sometimes, as a designer, you get an opportunity to work with material which is truly inspiring. You look at it, and think to yourself "Damn, that's nice."

Last year in October, I was approached by Boland Kelder to produce a website which would reflect their new brand identity onto the web. Their brand blueprint was created by the talented guys at Joe Public, and they needed to bring across the same feeling on the web as they've done with their print ads.

The approach

I tackled the site with a simple approach: reflect the rich colours of their wines, and do it in a format which allows for plenty of content (which was one of their requirements).

And so it began…

From the onset, I wanted to do the site perfectly. No shortcuts, no skimping. I wanted to create a site which would showcase the state of the art in technology, and what I'm capable of, without overwhelming the visitor in any way. Attention to detail would be very important, so I got down to pixel level.

A few examples:

The navigation was drawn almost pixel-by-pixel, with just a little bit of shading help from Corel.

All the navigation backgrounds were painstakingly roughened to look worn, with the shading done manually, using a 90% transparent brown-shaded brush.

The maps were interesting to do - also by hand, but with the help of the curve smoothing tool in CorelDraw.

Although it really involved a lot of work, I liked the worn look so much that I pushed on with the manual scratching, dabbing and shading. When it came to images of people, all the backgrounds were manually masked and faded using Gaussian blur. After that, a faded frame was applied to give each image its "through-a-binocular" look.

High res, anyone?

The source images provided were, without hyping, awe-inspiring. The original header images were taken by renowned photographer Alain Proust, and measured 22,000 x 3,000 pixels. Whoa. 340MB in TIF format. Needless to say, my PC was taking strain with a few of these open...

Some other stats:

• 5022 lines HTML & ASP.net
• 550 lines CSS
• 8190 words
• 41 279 characters

• 60 pages
• 229 images

Style, style, dynamisism

This was my second site built exclusively with CSS (I used tables in only one spot, where they're needed: the wine range grids). Even though my hand-coding isn't perfect yet, I decided to add a little bit of extravagance by including a Javascript stylesheet-switcher into the design. See the little "site flavour" button? Click it to switch between red and white wine versions of the site. Even though the difference is subtle (except for the header), I think it adds a little bit of personality

See the headlines with awards moving at the top of the page? Dynamic flash, fully editable, drawn from an database to an ASP.net page, and then parsed to flash. Once again, the first time I've done this, but it came out nicely I think. And, oh yes, they're transparent . I used this technique for the logo and selected elements on some pages - it gave me the ability to render everything in glorious vector format, with perfect transparency on any background... I've only come across transparency issues on some versions of Linux, but hey...

Was it worth it?

Yes.

All the manual effort involved some very late nights, but the end results are more than worth it. I suppose it's kinda difficult to explain, but seeing a site like this go live knowing the effort that's gone into it is hugely rewarding. Without any doubt, it makes every second of what I do worthwhile.

I hope you enjoy it

www.bolandkelder.co.za

You asked us if we could provide you with a level of service just a notch above our standard support contracts. We said "sure, with pleasure". We agreed on what the deliverables would be, and we were both happy - it's simple, you were giving us more business than usual, and we appreciate that.

Every time you ask us to do something for you, we get right on it, and we try our best to sort things out as soon as possible. Because you're really nice people, we thoroughly enjoy working with you. With smiles all around, you always understand when we hit snags, and we're honest with you when we do.

I wish all of our clients could be like you (and most are) - not because we make more money that way, but because I love it when everyone's happy. I love it so much that I've become obsessed with keeping people happy, and if I can't, I'd rather end the relationship than carry on in a strained, unpleasant way. I believe in the personal part of business relationships, and I'll keep on pushing this philosophy. When both parties in a relationship do things above and beyond what's expected, things can only be pleasant.

Thank you, very sincerely, for your business. We'll keep on doing what it takes to make sure you're always satisfied, just because of who you are.

The fact that you've sent us wonderful bottles of wine (on 3 occasions) hasn't influenced these few paragraphs at all....

You absolutely, positively rock!!

I tried to get some sleep. I really did, because sleep has been pretty much a non-routine thing for me this last while.

I tried putting the sheet over my head, but it was too damn hot. Bright idea - go sleep in the lounge on my Drakensberg Sleeper Couch. That worked. For a while… Then you caught up to me, and I couldn't pinpoint your location. The battle was mental, and I'm not a Jedi yet. I would've erased your ass! After a while, I moved back to my room, thinking you'd lose the trail. I was right. Take that, sucker!

To the mosquito (if you're even bothering to read this): Buzz off, you bloodsucking freak!

Business lesson of the week:If your brand is worth anything, you won't need to refer to it as a brand.

Maybe it's just nitpicking from my side, but it annoys the hell out of me to hear businesses going on about how wonderful their "brands" are - in their marketing material.

Sure, talk about the brand when you're working on marketing strategy, or when you're discussing it's value or future direction with other businesspeople. Just please, for crying out loud, NEVER tell the consumer how you're aligning your brand to their interests.

We're positioning our brand to give you maximum satisfaction - we're sure you agree that the core values of driven, dynamic youth which our brand projects lines up perfectly with your ambition as an up-and-coming consumer.

or, a South African ad showing up lately:

This advert is brought to you by Brand Power. Brand Power, helping you buy better.

Puhleees. I mean, c'mon, what the hell are you saying? Your product's better because it's branded? I'm your target market? So I'm going to make you money? Or are the other numbers (they were individuals once upon a time) in the group which I fall going to make you more money?

Tell me I'm a friend. Tell me you'd like to give me what I want, and that you appreciate my business. Even tell me how excited you are about this cool new stuff you've got for me.

Just, please, shhh about your brand already!