It all began with a grandiose idea, of course: create a top-notch website for the company to communicate with their no-nonsense thinking clients. While always a huge bonus, “creative thinking” communication was not a factor in this case, since the message conveyed had to be concise and unambiguous.
Cultivate’s promise to their clients is “Your message will be delivered in the right form, place, and time – to the right audience”. That’s exactly what their new website conveys. We know – medals are in order 😀
Clear and concise message delivery was crucial to the client, and we’ve chosen to steer clear of overusing photos and illustrations. While they’re great for establishing a visual mood, they’re also distracting, and we needed to “funnel” the end-user into reading texts. Verbalizing the messages was an idea that stood out during the concept stage. We’ve focused on blending simplicity with elegance and beauty to bring Cultivate’s request to life.
It was clear as day that we’ll be putting font front and center as soon as we’ve started the design phase. Harmonious font compositions with a tiny bit of graphical elements in between will ensure clear and direct communication without diverting attention to the other visual elements.
Second, we focused on soft and natural colors to reference, well, nature (and farming!), directly linking Cultivate with its target audience. Finally, we’ve added a bit of texture to the background, creating a sense of interaction not with a digital product, but something from the physical realm.
The twist involved weaving Cultivate’s geographical location into the design. The illustrations used the techniques and patterns of indigenous Australian tribes, native to Queensland, where Cultivate’s offices are located. The Gubbi Gubbi tribes drew with dots, and that’s reflected in our abstract illustrations. The dots’ rightful place provided an additional level of semantics to the website as a whole.
