ANTICS DIGITAL MARKETING
“We were looking for something that was simple, elegant and had an el­ement of playfulness that evoked our name, Antics,” says designer Anne Garwood. “We also wanted a slightly hand-done feel, without it look­ing explicitly rustic.” The manner in which content moves from screen to screen was designed to evoke an old mechanical device, where the user can see the mechanisms working. The animations are hand-drawn and, as such, they authentically enact the Antics brand.

The main objective of this self-promotional site was to introduce the firm’s refreshed brand identity with a sense of fun and creativity, and to build a flexible architecture for showing off the company portfolio. “Creatively, functionally and in terms of the story we tell about our work and our clients, the site accomplishes what we set out to do,” Garwood says. Like any website, though, this one went through an evolution process. “Nothing is or can be static online,” she says.

Because the target audience would be made up of people shop­ping around for marketing services, no effort was spared in pre­senting the full range of company capabilities—although overly dense content was studiously avoided. “In the work we do for cli­ents, we strive to communicate effectively through streamlined messaging and design,” Garwood says. “We tried to apply the same approach here.”

Everyone in this business knows how many ways there are to be ugly or clunky online. As the Antics team articulates it, anytime design gets in the way of finding what you need in a website, that’s just plain bad. “Design needs to support users in achieving their goals,” Garwood says. “That can be achieved by not obscuring a site’s functionality, as well as by creating a sense of welcome, and by giving users a real feel for … the brand behind the site.”

For this redesign, the team used the standard tools: Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator. Antics’ sites are all hand-coded from the ground up, and with the portfolio section XML-based, this one is very easy to update.

Playing the role of client and firm at once, the team found the whole process took longer than it should have. The job felt funny, they say. It forced them to sit down and define themselves. Being a fast-paced, client-centered agency, they discovered that making time for themselves was no easy task when there was always another “real” client demanding their attention. “A typical problem, I’m sure,” Garwood admits. “Like the cobbler’s children going shoeless.” R. Ashby

ANTICS DIGITAL MARKETING | CREATIVE DIRECTION/ART DIRECTION/DESIGN/PROGRAMMING: ANTICS TEAM | WWW.ANTICS.COM