The Heavy Chef Project » bite-size information about developing profitable web strategies
The Heavy Chef Project, as many of you know, is an initiative by our parent company, World Wide Creative. This forum is an extension of all the stuff we learn working with our clients in Europe and Africa on digital marketing campaigns. So, we’re pretty excited about our new presence that began with the redesign of the Heavy Chef site a few weeks ago, and now continued with the launch of a fresh new look for the WWC site.
There were three reasons for the design:
lochness-logo
This is just too cool. I saw this on Logo Faves (one of my favourite RSS feeds) and was gobsmacked by how spot on this design is. It’s always the simple stuff that kills. Love your work Mr Designer. Read Further
apple
The sales team at World Wide Creative have probably used the Apple website in a few of our client pitches as an inspiration piece for a combination of great design and usability. Nice, squeeky clean and conversion-focused. So, check out this classic piece of reinvention from a guy called Dave Lawrence that’s doing the interweb rounds right about now… Read Further
heavy chef
World Wide Creative and it’s subsidiary, The Heavy Chef Project, have been undergoing an intensive rebranding. The long and short of it is that the “revolution” is more of an “evolution”. Read Further
birdlove
This little guy is a peach, although, if it was me, I would have chosen a better font. Love the icon though. Read Further
We like this: Plinky, a new service that helps you create inspired content on the web (via ReadWriteWeb)
Like it or not. You’re a writer. You’re creating content on a daily basis, updating your Facebook status, commenting on blogs, sending tweets. Social networking requires that level of communication. But as a writer, you’re also a potential victim for writer’s block, a condition that plagues even the most prolific authors. Read Further
When I studied at the Cape Technikon Design School in the mid 90’s, a superbly talented mate of mine (who went to go onto be an art director at a host of advertising agencies in Cape Town and the UK) revealed that deep down his real passion was to be a movie credit designer. I was stunned, since I never really thought of that as a ‘career’. I’ve always remembered that conversation whenever I see a cool movie intro, and so, it was a fair dose of interest that I viewed Smashing Mag’s latest gallery masterpiece: ‘30 Unforgettable Movie Opening Sequences‘. Read Further
At World WIde Creative, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the brand of each client that we work with. This is a great springboard for creativity, since the brand contains the essential message that needs to be conveyed. At the heart of every brand is its visual identity. From a designer’s perspective, I know that it makes a site design a whole lot easier when the logo is designed well. Read Further
Vitaly and the team from Smashing have put together another top notch gallery of photos: check these out, focusing on Reflective Photography.
At World Wide Creative, a sticky point is often how much it costs to get decent images, but when you see a gallery like this one, entitled ‘50 Stunning Examples Of Reflective Photography’, it just nails the argument in favour of hiring a pro. Read Further
…it should enhance it.
There’s been a lot said about ‘user centred design‘ in web marketing circles recently. We talk about things like ‘conversion strategy‘ and ‘navigation strategy‘, phrases which have now become big buzzwords in marketing meetings. There’s no denying that these things are really, really important, but what if they come at a price? What if the the function of a site replaces creativity – instead of laying a platform for it? Read Further
icons
I love designing icons. It’s something that I still do whenever I get a chance. I find it relaxing, as weird as that may seem.
We often use icons for the sites we design at World Wide Creative. In our quest to develop sites that are profitable for our clients, we have seen (and research about the fact) that well-designed icons make difference to usability. Read Further
design muti
I’m pretty stoked to have found this: Design Float. It’s a Muti.co.za / Digg style design scrapheap. It’s now top on my Google Reader. Sweeet. Read Further
typography
It’s amazing how much detail goes into a website. Think of the functional components, programming technology, tags, site navigation and the personas. Phew! And that’s before we even touch the content.
Design is the glue that holds everything together. Read Further
vector art
A showcase of amazing talent. Once again a link to the brilliant Smashing Mag.
In the web design arena, we can sometimes get too restricted by the parameters of our media. I’ve always been a fan of book cover design. It’s something we did back in college, and it was always a fun, and challenging, project. Check out this collection put together by Vitaly and crew at Smashing Magazine. Great inspiration for web designers, to think a little differently. Read Further
What makes a great designer? I compiled this list after a decade of trying to be one. (This list applies to graphic designers as well as web designers.) Read Further
I came across a fascinating post entitled ‘The Evolution of Tech Company’s Logos’. Check these examples out, and see if you can identify them:
There was a great deal of excitement in the World Wide Creative web studio today. Mostly from me actually. The reason for this, is because, after much deliberation, debate and watching of Deliverance*, we completed our brand new look for a tired old warhorse: The Heavy Chef blog. The idea was to retain a thread of consistency with the World Wide Creative corporate identity – which is clean spaces, white, blue and greyscale – and then combine it with the whole Heavy Chef vibe of scattering ingredients everywhere. Read Further
I wrote an article on Ideate a while back about originality, and how it was impossible to create something truly original. This is a semantic argument, and your conclusion will differ depending on your interpretation of the word ‘original’. Read Further
When I opened my del.icio.us account many moons ago, I was tagging everything I found like a kid with a new toy. One of the first sites I bookmarked never really lived up to my expectations and I haven’t re-visited it for years. However I stumbled upon it again this morning and
Flash is a bit of a flashpoint in the web industry. There are those that believe that it should be done away with altogether, and those that advocate it over everything else. Sort of like religion, it engenders extreme
views and not much in between. Read Further
As a web marketing company, World Wide Creative focuses a lot on the actual design and usability of the websites we’re marketing. One of our biggest headaches is cross-browser compatibility – arrgh. This means making the dammmm thing work in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, as well as Firefox (our browser of choice – download it here) and all the rest. Read Further
