Re-Design Of Sapphire Studios

Not bad looking... your diagonal lines look a bit jaggedy at the moment though.

Looks good. Very sophisticated. A couple of things:

• The logo should be over a little bit to the right, so there is the same amount of space to the top, left, and bottom of it
• The blue mouseovers aren't working with the colour scheme at all. Try pulling in something from the apple photo on the right (either red or tan)
• Icons on the right side are really dull and typical. If you're going to sue icons they need to be unique and interesting. These are plain old windows default dingbats (just as a sidenote - a few weeks ago I saw a logo on the side of a van with the webdings house!)
• The logo looks good, but I think it would be better if the smaller words were stretched out to match the width of the larger words. That would give a more unified look. Otherwise a nice, simple logo design.
• For the photos in the header, I'm thinking you could do better than this. Also, if there's going to be a hard diagonal cut-off between the black section and the photo it should be more clear-cut.
• To answer your question, this is definitely looking more businesslike than the old design.

Your overall look has improved, but I think the photograph in your header needs rethinking. When I opened it up my first thought was agriculture. I don't think you want your visitors thinking of cows, pigs and orchards when they look at your page. If you want to use that image, maybe adding some text into the image that is ghosted, such as "photograhpy" or "web design" something along those lines in a nice font. Your architecture is good though. You are definately moving towards a professional site.

The New design looks way more better than the home page

Oh Megan.....me and the icons LOL!! I've been practicing, and I suck at them, so I will probablly be buying them from istock photo.

The mouseover color..I know, I mentioned that I'm trying to find something that works as far that the mouseover and link colors. Have tried pulling in a tanish color from the header photo and it's not that great either.

Yes, I agree, the new logo needs work. The existing logo doesn't seem to fit here.

I see that jaggy diagonal line now. (Bifocals here, I must have not had my head tilted right, so it looked okay to me through the top of my glasses.)

The photos in the header.........glad it's been mentioned. I didn't mention it to see if someone would. I was thinking along the lines of buzzwords...'Take times to enjoy life because we're doing the work'.....not those exact words but that kind of thought.

The overall look is getting better but I always think colour is as important, maybe just me but I hate black or even dark colours.
I think bright colours are always more pleasing to visitors and could make a difference to the photo at the top

It's good there is more contrast in new version. But save that cup if you can, it was good-looking. And I'm not sure about those icons on extreme right. Maybe they could be smaller and in not so important place?

-Teemu

I like/d the highkey version because of the cup, too.

There's a gap in Safari.

Could you smooth the edges a little? It seems almost harsh by comparison to the existing site. You might want to look at the design in greyscale. I'm finding the black parts almost entirely disappear for me, but you might run into the same problem I had with Howling Acres and the white part at the bottom?

Ack! Okay I think the navbar is probablly causing that gap, I'll remove it later tonight and see of that helps. It's a good thing I've been focusing on the nav stucture in my brain I guess! Maybe adjusting curves in the header, just a bit might help.

You know I like the white version, (though I hate the nav), I'm just not sure it's business-y enough.

It is more personal, yes. But that's part of your charm!

What about introducing something between black and white -- some warmer tones in the middle, some colour?

Definitely like the new design better, looks more like a site then just elements on a page. However, i do prefer the old site's logo, maybe you can incorporate that into the site? Invert the colours or something, so that the lettering is white.

Not too sure I like the orange boxes on the rollovers.

Nice site

I think the new one looks great! Just one thing: it would probably look a lot better with some different colours in it, rahter than just mainly black and white. Make it a bit more colourful!

Well I don't have anything to show yet, but I did lighten the heder graphic, but forgot to take the bottom tab at the same time. So I have to re-do all over again before you can see.

I'm thinking maybe a tanish beigeish color for as a page background, which mean I'll need to also re-do the images on the page since they sit on a white background currently. Hmmmmmm.....maybe even a bit of a graident?

In all honsetsy if I could find a way to do the nav on the existing design that would make me happy I'd keep it.

Stuff to think about!

I appreciate the comments! The color issues seems to be a consistant complaint telling me that something is missing.

I would make the rollover color for button areas grey, and the logo background, it's too dark, some lights there would be great.

I definently like the new menus better.

To me, the new designs seems too closed in after seeing the old one.