BIROCO WEB DESIGN -=|=- Elegant, stylish, and standards-compliant websites

So… you want a stylish website, do you?

“Wow! Very good-looking indeed. You've got a definite flair for stylish web layout without resort to Flash iniquities. Your site looks great, very elegant, which is a word that rarely comes to mind with the web.”

– John Coulthart, graphic designer, Atelier Coulthart

A website should look attractive and simple. And certainly elegant. No two ways about this: most websites are lacklustre.

Over-complicated, too many things happening on the page, just a confusing noise. You don't want a website like that… do you?

Most websites aren't written very well either. They fail in the only thing they have to succeed at: they don't encourage people to read them. The writing's dull, doesn't have a punch to it. Strikes you they don't really know who they're addressing and why.

Another thing: aren't a lot of websites, well, y'know… a bit samey? There's a 'corporate look' going round like a bad flu bug. Makes you want to take to your bed and shut down.

All great design is simple and elegant, whether with a jazzy style or a demure style or a quirky style a site should be user-friendly, inviting, and be so well-made it looks to have been created with an effortless ease. Sharp clean lines that make you gasp just a little on first glimpse. Integrated typography. And the writing should grab its audience without jargon, be plainly spoken, getting its message across from the moment a person first lays eyes on it.

A good website should load quickly and thereby announce its presence all at once. Not everyone has broadband, the site needs to appear virtually straight away on a dial-up connection. Someone once worked out that the average surfer's patience threshold with a loading page was 8 seconds.

And research published in 2006 found that internet users take one-twentieth of a second to decide whether they like the look of a website, whether it has anything of value for them. Our instinctive emotional reaction to a site the moment we see it decides whether we are going to trust it, the 'good vibe' spreads from aesthetic appeal into other areas, such as the content.

Not that poor content can be sold by great design, but that excellent design allows equally excellent content to be seen in its best light, without the aura of distrust that amateurish design subconsciously engenders. Psychologists call this the 'halo effect', whereby an initial bias towards something drives subsequent judgments. For a business website selling products, success relies on creating an instant favourable first impression. Fail to create that, and no-one's going to stay to read it.

Time for a fresh approach

By setting up this web design agency I plan to show you that a website succeeds when it is created holistically, as much attention being paid to the quality of the writing as to the overall design concept of the site. I'll explain my design principles, the three pillars of which are simplicity, elegance, and a clean look. Add to that: hand-made. Beyond the technical skill involved in designing a website, I bring something else to the table that is less common: vision and originality. BIROCO WEB DESIGN is not a trend-follower, it's a trend-setter. I have definite opinions about what makes a good website, and I put these ideas into practice. You're not just commissioning any old web designer here, you're buying into a fresh approach.

I like to rethink design all the time, come up with something a little more eloquent and inspiring than the average standard-facia site. Dull-looking websites burden the soul, making you wonder whether someone important said all websites should look bland and insipid, and can turn reading the web into a hopeless trudge from site to site looking for something just a little bit different.

The Golden Section

In the 90s, to rediscover excitement in text and typography, I reverted from offset-litho to letterpress printing, setting books in lead type by hand. I discovered in the process that I went right back to the foundations of what makes a page in a book attractive, some inexplicable combination of the Golden Section, proportion, word density, weight of type, colour, font. I developed what I like to think is a good eye for design. I studied the designs of the Bauhaus, the Futurists, Soviet Constructivist typography and poster design, the asymmetrical layout of Jan Tschichold, the classical lines of Claude Garamond and the plain simplicity of Eric Gill. The colour harmonies of Paul Klee's palette and his idea of 'taking a line for a walk' found their way into the mix as well, as did the graphic design of Saul Bass. These influences I bring to web design. To me, the sheer potential for what a website can be and how it can look has hardly yet begun to be tapped.

My interest in good design on the web fits in with a broader interest in art and design in general. My background is as an editor as well as a designer, so naturally I ensure the design serves the text rather than overwhelms it. An attractive design is worthless if it makes the words it is supposed to present hard to read.