Stylish New Website Design for Creative/Consulting Start-up

Noble Group

We are a family-run hybrid creative/business consulting firm working with clients that range from start-ups to mid-size energy firms. We are HIGHLY service-oriented and client-centric and have a long history of expertise in green building, clean technology, and sustainability.

We need your help! After several years of operating on an ad hoc, side-project basis, several of us have quit our corporate jobs to build this company full-time. We are finally launching our web presence, and require a homepage and interior page design for a brand new website.

We often outsource design work, and so this contest is a great opportunity for the top designers to receive REPEAT WORK from us.

To address the tastes of both our consulting clients and our creative/design clients, the website design needs to BOTH dignified+professional+clean AND visually interesting+fresh. Sophistication balanced with creativity will get a very good response from us.

Our clients range from start-up companies to medium and large-sized firms. Many are in the clean energy space.

We need the designs for a home page, a "services" page and a video gallery page.

COLORS: Maximum of 3 different colors, one of which should be green as we are an eco-friendly company that provides sustainability & LEED consulting…

LOOK & FEEL: We don’t plan to have a ton of content up on the site – we are big fans of short and sweet, and are happy with that idea being carried through the design.

We DO NOT want this to look like a template - be creative!! - but please keep it simple with easy navigation. The less scrolling required the better, so please design it so that almost everything on the homepage fits on the screen.

GRAPHICS/IMAGES/LOGO: We’ve attached illustrator file that has several different arrangements of our logo. Do with it whatever you think looks best.

We would love for you to create some graphics/visual interest on at least the homepage and "services" page, as we are not going to display a lot of our portfolio of work (except for the video library page) because certain categories, like Advisory services will seem too empty. Graphics could represent things including: green business; digital animation; animated videos; quality service; pay less, get more; located in ny, san fran, and san diego.

LAYOUT & NAVIGATION: Intuitive and simple/easy to navigate

This is our first project, so if we have left something out or sthg doesn't make sense, just ask!

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The HOMEPAGE should have:
• 2-6 calls to action, whether buttons or blocks with images. We like the way http://www.apple.com and http://www.gm.com accomplish this. A different approach might be to make a tiled homepage like this one: http://www.digitalpodge.co.uk/2009/, which we really like. Some tiles may just be the tagline written in styled text. Other tiles could have a graphic that represents one of the taglines. When you scroll over any of the tiles it it would reveal the descriptive text. Just an idea. Usable text is provided in the attached pdf – please make sure to definitely use text from the "Affordable and..." and "Green that goes..." calls to action.
• The major homepage tagline and paragraph included at the top of the attached pdf
• 4 menu tabs: About, Services, Work, and Contact

The SERVICES PAGE should have:
• The same menu as the homepage
• Navigation for the subpages: Design, Marketing, Media, and Advisory
• An area for describing the services (again, use attached pdf for copy). This includes a way to show the types of service (e.g. service = "ADVERTISING" and the types of that service = online, POP displays, tradeshow displays)
• A way to display 2-3 small thumbnails/teasers of portfolio work that readers will click on to get to our portfolio page

The VIDEO GALLERY should have a space to view videos, and navigation for the different videos somewhere on the page.

http://trentwalton.com/ (simple and impactful, nice balance of colors, but too playful for our purposes)
http://blakeallendesign.com/ (again, simple and impactful, but maybe a bit too punchy. Would like a bit of softness – could be balanced with the use of serif fonts…)
http://secondandpark.com/ (like layout below header, the impact of the large font)
http://www.digitalpodge.co.uk/2009/ (like how refined yet very fun and visually interesting (graphics are great). Softness of the colors is nice. Layout is nice)
http://www.dba-co.com/ (like clean, distinguished look and impactful font with image)
http://www.apple.com (like the timelessness of it, image is impactful and very functional, like the call to actions at the bottom)
http://glue.be/en/ (very easy on the eyes and easily navigable, we don't however like the font or cheesy photo images, it also looks too similar to a template)