Urbanstraße goes Urban Design
We delivered our second piece of overseas work: a new website for Interboro Partners, »a New York City-based architecture, urban design, and planning office that specializes in the design of public spaces.«
After the commission for JAE (Journal Of Achitectural Education), we are not only expanding our international projects, but are also demonstrating once again a great affinity with offices, media and companies in the fields of architecture, urban planning, interior design and design in general. Another special feature is that in this project we have used our own editor development »AIO« (a provisional name that stands for »All In One«) for a client project. So far, this ambitious piece of code has only been used for our own relaunch.
So Interboro Partners have kind of been part of the beta test team for the past months. Together, we have even further developed smaller functionalities.
100 % HENKELHIEDL
The editor makes it possible to design detail pages completely freely with a minimal set of (naturally responsive) rules, without the need for code or dedicated design experience. A good eye for basic editorial and visual rules certainly helps. Good pictures and a coherent concept contribute a lot to the positive overall impression of a website. And this is exactly where we could rely on the commitment of Interboro Partners – as we already did with JAE. The whole project is 100 % in the hands of Henkelhiedl. Completely without technical service providers.
While the »AIO« editor and the corresponding CMS form the basis for the relaunch of the site formerly operated with Wordpress, we have clearly moved away from our own relaunch, especially in terms of concept and design. Which shows how flexible the system can be used overall.
On the start page, a short self-portrayal forms the head of the page. This is followed by the large variants of teasers on selected highlights. The menu then sorts all the articles on the page according to category and displays them immediately via teasers in the medium-sized variant. For this, we use the responsive properties of all page elements, which kept the programming effort low. Each detail page is – as been said – individually designed. Finally, there are small teasers for »similary projects" – but only if it is also a project page, of course.
Gimme Gimmicks
The search is also striking. In order to mirror the size of the area that enters the page in the desktop view in the same way as the menu, we created the search field horizontally without further ado. A somewhat crude gimmick at first glance, but the customer spontaneously liked it. Which makes us happy. An eye-catcher - even if the users have to tilt their heads.
Also remarkable is the rather consistent design concept for internal and external links. A mouse over on internal links triggers a colour gradient animation, symbolic of the (colour) diversity of one's own content. External links blacken everything except the linked word to make it clear: new tab!
