Metz, The Social Concept Website
- Client
Metz, The Social Concept - url
http://adammetz.com - Date
December 2008
Adam Metz was in the process of building an online home for his consulting & strategizing company, Metz, and called us in to make the process as smooth as possible. The project would involve creating a new site from the ground up, and additionally would roll in his blog, the MetzMash, keeping it under the same branding umbrella. Instantly, we had one goal in mind, to separate the Metz website from the rest of his competitors, who all too often fall back on two column, tweaked WordPress themes. A few color changes here and a headline treatment there would not suffice.
In our early conversations, Adam described the project goals to us in terms we could easily understand. “If everything I’ve done up to now was my debut EP, consider this my first album. It needs to make an impact.” Describing your design goals in album terms, definitely music to our ears. And with that we set out giving Metz a digital makeover.
The initial site design was built around the idea that what Metz sells is the expertise that Adam brings to the table. There are no flashy logos, no over the top design elements. Just Adam and the information he has for you. It’s clean, simple, organized and exactly the visual interpretation of what you get when you hire Metz. To this end, Reneé Allen was brought in to do a photo shoot with Adam, giving us a plethora of wonderful pictures to utilize in our design.
Once the initial frame was in place, it was time to elevate things. Using the idea of an album as a launching pad, we approached each section of the site as a different track on the disc, each individually numbered, and each with it’s own color scheme. This included section specific favicons to really focus in on this section-based design change. Finally, new images from the photo shoot were brought in on each section to further add to the feeling that browsing through the site was a similar movement through time, as if you were watching the photo shoot from start to finish.
The final step was to rethink the entire display of the blog. Typically, blogs incorporate three columns, one column of content and two columns filled with clutter, links, widgets, forms and other visual cruft. The concept was simple: Focus on content and clean up the secondary information. The final effect is elegant and light, showing only the secondary information the user requests, and keeping all else out of the way, allowing the eye to focus at all times on what’s most important: the writing.