Logo and Website Design

When I was writing about creating the logo I mentioned that it plays well with our website design. Thing, we were talking about while discussing how the logo should look like, was how the website would correspond to the logo. It’s very important especially when your product is the website itself. Then, the logo should be an integral part of whole design, so you shouldn’t come with something looking totally different.

Colors

First thing is a color palette. Some colors compose well with each other, some don’t. Even if the colors play well on the site, the logo shouldn’t shine too much. E.g. mixing navy-blue and orange is generally a good idea, but I wouldn’t go for an orange logo on a navy-blue website. For us in Overto, it was easier because when we were designing the logo we had only a draft version of the website. We used the color palette taken from the logo (gray and orange) and used it in final design of the website.

Leitmotif

Having some graphic symbol corresponding to the logo, going through the website is a nice concept. It makes the service looking as a whole, beginning from company’s logo and finishing with small details on the site. Another time, it was easy for us, because the orange triangle just begged us to become the leitmotif. We use it in a number of places:

• Rating.
We rate results of query in a 1-5 scale. Instead of displaying the bar or something we have our triangles in a row (from 1 to 5).

• Tree.
We have categories tree, which can be (surprise, surprise) expanded and collapsed, so instead classic plus and minus in the box icons we use our triangles in two versions (one turned by 90 degrees).

• Progress bars.
In a couple of places we display progress bars. Not the classic one showing percentage of completion, but just something showing the user that the service is not dead, but it’s working (really) hard (to provide customer’s satisfaction). Instead of standard cogwheels we have (you won’t guess) triangles arranged in the circle spinning around whenever we want to tell our users to wait a bit.

General design

Our logo looks rather conservative and clean, so should the website. We decided not to use fancy graphics and left the website looking unclogged. But still, I prefer current design than standard business webpages overloaded with graphics, with a couple of sidebars filled with adverts and other content. I guess that with some “messy” design Overto logo could play well too, yet still I believe it corresponds better the way we designed the site.