Professional finishing of our mockups (Re-ad with higher prize - negotiable!)

We've done mockups what we want our site to 'say'. But now we need a really excellent designer to polish it for a really professional finish - projecting classy, classic, authoritative, excellence, trustworthy. I'm re-advertising this project with a higher prize now, but am still open to negotiation for full finishing and more work later if you feel that's what it will cost for your skills.

Scotweb - weavers to the World

Tagline:
The World's Largest Tartan Store

Desired Color Scheme:
Blue - and working with colours from tartan sample top left

Desired Style:
Classic, classy, authoritative, subtly Scottish, expert, friendly

Accepted File Formats:
Layered Formats (.psd or .tiff)

This is for a full-scale redesign of our existing site at http://www.scotweb.co.uk with the aim of making it cleaner, clearer, and to give a more classy look that better reflects the quality of our products. We will do all implementation.

I have produced jpeg mockups for both a 'tartans' Landing Page and a Product Page, as well as with an example menu dropping down from the main navigation tabs. I've also included a couple of pics of the tartan we want to use. And there's also my raw photoshop file which you may find helpful. You'll find these at: http://www3.scotwebshops.com/scotweb_redesign/

We'd like to see reworkings of these two pages to choose a contest winner, and then we'd ask the winner to produce a few more page templates (ranges, checkout, etc) as part of the prize. We'd also ask for a set of widget graphics (for open, close, info, etc) for both current and future use.

Briefly, this is the basic look and feel we want, and we're not looking for major substantive changes (although we will of course listen to well-reasoned suggestions). We've been through plenty of iterations already, and this is the best approach we have yet, compiling various inputs and considerations. The overall aim is to look clearer, classier, and a bit less boxy, whilst avoiding tiny/fiddly interactions for our elderly users.

What we do want is to tighten up my untrained design through mostly subtle improvements that may be obvious to you, but I'll run over briefly here...

COLOUR THEMES

We want to use the specific tartan shown in the top left (which continues our old computer background themes) as a splash of soft fabric more or less as seen, but done better. We can email you the snaps to work from. Or we can rephoto it - this was snapped quickly yesterday.

We want to use blue and yellow/gold (complementing with the tartan, though not necessarily the same) as principal colours, and purple as another key colour for highlights. The green from the tartan would be dropped (and basically only ever appear in photos). The body background should be white, text black, and links blue (not the bright html default blue) with complementary shades for light-on-dark instances.

Basically, we need colour use to be improved both in terms of the precise pallette employed and in consistency of application to reduce colour-clutter.

FONTS & TEXT

None of the fonts we're currently using are required. But we they do more or less give the effect we want. The logo font isn't ideally legible, but humanises the company more than our current logo. The tagline(s) should be there (and may change for different Landing Pages).

We need to end up with a consistent stylesheet of fonts, with a list of fallbacks for elegant degradation.

The text areas should remain in roughly their positions. Some of the text isn't quite finished, but gives the idea.

ALIGNMENT & LAYOUT

I've tried to work to a three-column principle. But as you'll see it's by no means rigorous. I'm hoping a designer's eye will improve both the general and specific positionings and alignments on the page.

We're thinking in terms of a fixed layout, with the page area centered in the browser window when wider. Haven't thought about what shows outside the page in the browser window.

ELEMENTS

Most of the current design elements (tabs, text boxes, dividers) could use some improvement, both as stand-alone items and also in terms of overall consistency and integration.

The 'features' boxes (tartan finder etc. to the right of the logo, whose contents would change according to Landing Page) could be a lot better. And things like the boxes for the video/e-book below were early drafts I've done nothing with since. Ditto the tabbed information box on the Product layout, pretty ugly and unfinished. The shaded grey horizontal divider-headers (e.g. for the Menswear etc. index pics in the middle of the page) I quite like, but aren't of course fixed.