DESIGN Services
We find it useful to think of design not only as visual style but also as a tool. It’s not enough for a design to look good (important as that is) — they should be functional in that they accomplish a task or a goal. That’s why there is no single approach to design – the first question that must be asked before starting any project is not “what do you want the design to look like” but “what do you need the design to do?”
Sometimes you are just going to want flash – memorable, high impact designs that grab attention and stand out from the field. Most often, however, you'll want your design to be a workhorse... able to present information consistently and clearly in your chosen media (or across various media). This is especially important in web design — your design needs to create a visual system that accomodates a wide variety of situations, some of which you won’t necessarily be able to anticipate.
Stop14 takes this functional approach to design. Perhaps it’s our technological background that makes us pay attention to issues of design implentation and internal logic. Perhaps its our experience designing (and reading!) books that makes us notice the interplay between eye-catching design and eye-saving legibility. Or perhaps it’s simply the fact that we know the frustrations of encountering disfunctional design.
Whatever the case we pay very close attention to issues of useability. Oh, we’re still design heads. We can admit that we get a little giddy over aesthetically stunning work. We are no fans of boring, generic, and/or stereotypical design. Nevertheless we always ground ourselves by placing an emphasis on solid, real-world applicability.