Yorkshire has amassed an incredible level of creative talent over the last few years with new web design companies popping up all over the place. For those looking for expert advice and creative talent you no longer have to leave the beautiful countryside to find it, the big smoke doesn’t seem so alluring any more. Yorkshire boasts some of the best talent in the country and this post is dedicated to showcasing the best of the best.

The Floating Frog has searched high and low for the best web design companies in Yorkshire, with over 100 companies making the list and 30 making the cut. We were looking at companies that boasted a high level of creative flair in their portfolio’s, who practiced what they preached on their own website and who we felt could bring creative and technical innovation to every project. We present to you, in no particular order…

Yorkshire’s Got Talent!

9xb – Harrogate – Visit

MadeByPi – Leeds – Visit

Cefar Marketing – Leeds – Visit

Fuse8 – Leeds – Visit

Mixd – Harrogate – Visit

Viaus – Hull – Visit

1081 – Leeds – Visit

Tea Bag – Leeds – Visit

Fabre – Hull – Visit

Magnitude – Harrogate – Visit

Net Construct – Wetherby – Visit

New Media Boutique – Leeds – Visit

Label Media – Leeds – Visit

Bronco – Ripon – Visit

Extreme Creations – Harrogate – Visit

Edit Studios – Harrogate – Visit

939 Design – Hull – Visit

Creode – Leeds – Visit

Bloom Media – Leeds – Visit

Till Willy – Leeds – Visit

Fish Tank Creative – Leeds – Visit

Optical Juice – Leeds – Visit

Enjoy Digital – Leeds – Visit

Turn Design – Harrogate – Visit

Welford Media – Leeds – Visit

Anoveta – Durham – Visit

Think Synergy – Harrogate – Visit

Darren Atkinson – Hull – Visit

My agency 9xb recently moved premises and required a full refit. Part of the existing setup was a rather blank white wall with a red fire alarm top center of it. This area was to be the reception wall that clients and guests would see when entering the building so we decided to go crazy and generate some artwork to fill the space and brighten the room up. The simplest thing to do would be to paint it, but we’re not like that here, we don’t mind taking risks and thinking outside the box.

Before the refit started we took a couple of shots of the wall from different angles and mocked up a few ideas.

Options whittled down

Option 1: Millions of sheep

An illustration of hundreds of sheep with one cheeky-chappy chilling out.

Option 1: Millions of sheep – closeup

Option 2: Crazy phychodelic sheep

Seriously bright, seriously mental.

And the winner is…

The crazy phychodelic sheep of course!

Another angle mocked up

The final file ended up being 1.4gb in size, measuring 3.5m by 2.2m. Sheep image from istockphoto, printed out and an industrial high res scan created, merging a phychodelic rainbow as a Photoshop Smart-Object then sent to printers who came a week later to fix it to the wall. I’ll get a real photo uploaded asap.

Previous digital art for 9xb

View 9xb digital art post here

This week at work was quite exciting with a brand awareness campaign spear-headed by a photo shoot outside our offices. A large 4m squared sign of our logo, in 16 seperate pieces was created prior to the shoot by our sign makers, and would serve as the focus of the campaign. Each member of the team would hold a piece of the puzzle, run around in an unorganised manner then swiftly come together to form the 9xb logo.

This photo shoot was initially setup for a press release shot to welcome a new member to the team. I was asked to come up with an idea for the photo that would fill the following criteria:

• Show the new member of the team
• Show off our new premises
• Show the size of our team
• Show that we’re a local design agency with real creativity
• Portray a fun and friendly company, not afraid of making a fool of ourselves

The standard shot would of been to have the boss (Rob) shaking hands with Gyles (new sales executive) outside the building on a sunny day, with the logo on the wall in the background and two cheesy smiles finishing off the scene. Dull huh?

I thought why not portray our company visually somehow. The boss has always stated it’s the people that underpins the company so why not get them involved? Why not visually represent this somehow in the photo? So, 16 pieces of the logo, 16 members of staff making up the puzzle, with the message being that we believe each member is part of the company and collectively form 9xb as we know it?

In concept it sounded perfect, a massive floating logo hovering around the car park, it’s fun, light hearted, but most of all the key message being thrown out there is our logo and image. Brand awareness gone crazy. Now let’s look at some snap shots I took of the fiasco, with a behind the scenes feel to see what actually happened.

The team gathers

Joanne and Zoe start proceedings

Chris and Dan complete the second row

Logo starts to form

Cool it’s complete – Joanne cheekily peeking through.

And relax!

Looking at what’s actually going on underneath the logo – CHAOS!

Another angle

Ok so the logo looked all over the place, but that was the point, ununiformity adding character and a sense of fun to the shoot, which in turn would hopefully stay in peoples minds.

As a designer I’m sometimes asked to design speculative concepts to accompany quotes and tenders. This is work we are simply pitching for so the design has to impress the potential client or else we simply won’t get the job. These jobs can be quite tricky because not only do they have to look good, you have to balance this with how much time you can spend on it, after all it’s unpaid work.

The client?

St Annes Community Services

St Anne’s was formed originally to work with people who were homeless and excluded. Our first service was shaped around what these people said they needed. This focus on service users being central to what we do and how we develop is core to what we do today.

We now provide a range of services for people who have experienced homelessness, mental health problems, problems with substance misuse or who have a learning disability throughout Yorkshire and the North East of England.

From our small beginning in 1971, the organisation has grown and developed to become a major provider with a turnover of some £30m and employing approximately 1200 staff.

Well it ok really. Sure it’s seen better days but all in all it’s not doing the charity any harm. They already have a logo which has to remain, their color scheme is blue and yellow which also can’t be changed and they have alot of copy and images I can play around with. Not bad to start with at all.

The design

I think this is one of the best looking ecommerce websites I’ve ever seen. It’s clean, modern, feels fresh and makes you want to buy Alfresia’s products because the user interface is so intuitive and easy to navigate. Each section is colour coded to help with ease of navigation and location within the website and the layout is structured in such a way that you hardly need to use the search tool to find what your looking for. The simple design and colour scheme simply compliments the products, allowing them to be prominent in the design and not the design itself.

A creative and strategic mix of ‘warehouse’ style and ‘up-market John Lewis esk’, this site ticks all the boxes and targets a wide spectrum of the market.

Alfresia have complete control over the website, illustrating that not all websites will be bastardised by the client, with the right control measures, a dedicated marketing team and a visionary client that knows their business, and customers, a successful website can be achieved, both visually and financially. With this new website, sales have rocketed, leaving this client requiring more hands on staff to handle the extra work load.

Alfresia, in my opinion, is the best website 9xb has ever produced. Don’t believe me! Well the sales tell me another story, lets hope their success continues…

Oh forgot to mentioned, this was my project, I designed and templated the whole website, with database help from the developers at 9xb. Sweet!

CWI (Cohen and Wilks) design, manufacture and supply clothing garments to some of the highstreets biggest retailers. They wanted a new website to replace their current one which is starting to show it’s age. I got to visit their headquarters in the heart of Leeds and got given a guided tour of their entire manufacturing process, from the initial designers studios (predominently young female designers for some reason), to the warehouse and the clothes inspection and sorting lines.

My first impressions of CWI were that they were a major player in the clothes retail market, with operations in the UK, Asia and Europe. They are also part of the Mutsui & Co., Ltd group whom own a large percentage of the company.

We were joined by the same photographer who we comissioned to photograph the Thackray Museum whom will be helping to capture some great shots for the new website.

Taking all these factors into account, this is what I came up with:

This week saw a few new clients websites enter our studio at 9xb. One in particular, Gmund cars was worth a mention I thought.

Gmund cars is a specialist Porsche dealership based in knaresborough, selling such cars as the 911, Carrera and the beautiful 996 GT3R. It’s also worth mentioning that they have a Koenigsegg CCR for sale at £350,000 if anyone fancies it.

The name Gmund is taken from the name of the town in Austria where Doctor Porsche and his family began to build cars after the Second World War, hence explaining where the name derives from.

Gmund came to us for a simple, professional looking website to showcase a new, limited edition car they were about to manufacture. This new car, named the Tygan Speedster, is based on the 1959 Porsche 356 and is reported to be limited to a run of just 20. The account manager Dan Martin even got to drive one which I’m most envious about because I think this is a stunning looking car plus with this new version, not only do you get the hot looks, you also get the luxury of driving a new car, with a new engine and all the other mod-conditions.

This is what I came up with:

Lets hope the client likes it, and I get to drive one of these beauty’s!

Digital art staff portraits for 9xb, which collectively took circa 60 hours to complete.

View my Flickr 9xb page for full size versions.

Another 9xb success story, another exercise in modern Web 2.0.

A snippet from the client case study on the new 9xb website.

Pleasure Island approached 9xb looking for a website to support their prime time TV advertising campaign. Phase one of the project was to build an information site that would provide a reference point for the attraction with a design aimed to project the excitement of a day out at this theme park. Still in the pipeline is phase two, building an interactive park map and developing an online ticket ordering facility.

I was the account designer for Pleasure Island and I thoroughly enjoyed designing a website that wasn’t ‘ecommerce’ or ‘white label’, this actually had a great design potential that wasn’t fulfilled by their existing website.

Time for another snippet I think..

As a theme park, it was important for the design to have the wow factor, to get across the excitement of the attractions and to give browsers a real feel for the thrilling rides they’ll find at the park. Pleasure Island had a strong existing corporate identity and the site needed to mirror this style and tie in with their printed communications materials.

Using the powerful Javascript framework, jQuery we created seamless ride selection transitions on the white knuckle ride page, presenting ride videos and photos in an effective and slick way.

6 weeks and over 200 working hours later my employers new website has finally gone Live.

It looks great, and has received rave reviews from all 9xb’s clients and associates. One client was quoted in saying “Most probably the best website I have ever seen“… sweet to hear but I feel this client may have been flattering us slightly.

I as usual contributed both on the design and the build. My major contribution was in the ‘Team’ section, every member of staff (all twenty of them) had their own page created for them. In the initial planning meetings I came up with the idea of creating a set of high impact, computer manipulated photographs of the team, with the aim of setting the company apart from its competitors and highlighting the great personalities we have in the company.

Below is an example of a before (original) and after…

… yep, that’s me, a very rare shot of me too!

A few screenshots:

Things I did:

• Organised and creatively directed the companies photoshoot
• Creation of 20 high impact staff portraits
• Partial design, including team pages
• Overall execution of design and development

Please visit www.9xb.com to see it in all it’s glory!