We’ve just completed a new site for The Library, a collaborative of product and design specialists, based in Johannesburg. They produce public sculpture, design books and exhbitions.
The site itself is really simple and clean – the design idea behind it is to create an online documentation of the projects, so the site design consists of balance, careful typography and space, rather that strong design elements like colour, pattern and so on.
We have developed a neat slider gallery to show images relating to the projects – this is a fairly standard gallery system, but this implementation is neat, clean and effective. It is editable through the Content Management System, where the admin can add images, give them captions and re-order them. A mini version of this gallery system is also used on the Home page. Keeping the gallery system simple and clean (both in design and user-interaction) fits neatly with the overall design of the site.
Notes on typography:
The site is set in Georgia Regular, with titles and Project category headers set in Frutiger Bold, with generous letter-spacing. The Library corporate identity uses 2 fonts: Frutiger Sans Bold (1968, Adrian Frutiger) and Frutiger Serif (2008, Adrian Frutiger). The differences, particularly in weight, between these 2 fonts are at the root of the tension and balance in the design.
