Project Breakdown
Website design (and build) for a Japanese cloud services company based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Lots of visualisations needed for this one, as well as a large number of bespoke graphics and illustrations, along with a brand refresh, improving the execution of their original logo.
The New Bubble Man Logo
The company wanted to keep its existing mascot, but we collectively came to the decision that it should be rerendered in clean, flat, balanced artwork and the accompanying logotype should be replaced altogether. I recreated the logotype in hand-shaped, rounded geometric sans, with a graphical flourish in the form of discs within the letterforms suggesting switches to convey the highly configurable and customisable nature of their open source software products.
The Challenges
No project would be complete without its own set of unique challenges to overcome, and this was no exception – the primary concern being the multi-sectional, hierarchical site structure. They wanted a site which had multiple sections, one for general company information and one dedicated to each of their major products/service offerings. The solution came in the form of a top bar menu to switch between sections and another menu in the site header alongside the brand for navigating to internal pages within a specific section. In some cases the main brand in the header would then change depending on the section.
On mobile, the decision was made to buck the trend of having the ubiquitous hamburger menu in favour of leaving all menus in the page for mobile users also so there are no extra clicks. Leaving the navigation exposed also gives the users an instant overview of the relatively complex site structure and makes the browsing of the various sections of the site more intuitive.
Technologies
The team at Axsh being big into open source, they were all very familiar with Git and keen to host their site on Github pages, which I was also very much in agreement with. They had also opted to use static site generator Middleman, having already started to move content into the empty site structure. I had never used Middleman before being more in favour of Jekyll and Gatsby, but it didn’t take long to get up to speed and like most static site generators was a breeze to work with. The team opted not to go for any back end as they were comfortable editing the markdown files and templates themselves, so no CMS was integrated in this case.
