Aqua Earth | Website & Logo Design
BJ Creative was tasked by James Owens to build a website for his structural land works business. This incorporates the provision of water for festivals, the laying of new roads for provate land and more substantial projects including the building of purpose built lakes. Aqua Earth are based in Stamford, so early meetings were quick and the outlay of what they were after was very simple. They wanted a clean looking logo that could be projected on to all of their materials and clothing. Their website did not need to be overly complex, but did need to be able to convey the core skills that they provide.
We began the project by working up some ideas for Aqua Earth to review. The logo was the starting point and we had a blank canvas with regards to colour, size and layout.
Logo Design
We started off work with the two key words and the message that they were trying to push across. We began by incorporating icons of machinery, leaves and trees and blueprints for buildings. However after the first review meeting, it was decided that plain text was the best approach to convey the clean professional image.
Following the first logo meeting, designs were sent across to merge some of the trends that we were developing for the logo. Once the final layout was decided upon, we started work on the colours that they wished to use.
Web Design
Waiting for the logo signoff, meant that we were able to look into the competition very heavily to establish what they were pushing and how they were achieving their search results.
After the logo signoff, we immediately began working up the designs to show how the home page would look. The initial designs were all very plain but incorporating a large earthen footer. Once Aqua Earth saw this, they wanted to try something different. They asked us to try and work up one of their events that they create each year, the Secret Garden Party, in a format that would demonstrate some of the work that they have done.
This gave us a challenge, but we rose to the task. Using Vue X-Treme, the same software that was used in the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar, we started to build a mock-up one of the sites, including the purpose built lake. We added some tents, that we then were able to impose the Aqua Earth logo on to. The build of this 3-D set took some time, but everytime that a render was produced, there were more great features added to the list. The last addition though, is perhaps the most notable. The giant floating rubber duck!!
The rubber duck was an essential ingredient once James was aware of the capabilities of this software.
Recommendations
We recommended some key words that should be focused on and we also went through some of the rival sites that Aqua Earth would be coming up against.
The Build
We built the site using ASP.NET 4.0 and incorporated a contact page and used Master Pages throughout the site. The site was made mobile responsive from the start, to ensure that the best experience was had across the board.
The site was initially hosted by BJ Creative on our server so that changes could be amended quickly at our end and this also then enabled us to managed the domains chosen for the website.
Skills used
Website design: Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
Website Build: Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Visual Studio
The website can be viewed at www.aqua-earth.co.uk
Web design in Stamford
