Grand Central Server

Logo + brand development
... with site design

 

After a successful decade providing general access to the internet via www.PANIX.com, the crew began to address corporate data infrastructure needs with an off-shoot called Grand Central Server. Form and Function had done previous design work for founder Alexis Rosen's other ventures and was pleased to help get this one launched. GCS offers top-notch in-house tech support and fail-safe secure serving as an out-sourced IT function rather than internal distraction to the core expertise of a client and their business strategems.

 

Forging A Metaphor

The logo idea was of an old favorite shop-worn hand-tool made durable, strong, high-tech, and honed to a knifes' edge for XXIst century business. Production of their public symbol was an involved process as the client had specific notions and texture ideas that conveyed the rugged industrial strength decades of brutal daily abuse gives to heavy machinery and steel hand tools. GCS sought symbols that evoked die-hard raw functionality through the harshest of conditions and over several months we hammered-in several layers of meaning into a unified design. The basic geometry of the logo presents a protective shield. The strength of the repeating elements with their identical angular symmetry and de-saturated palette exudes corporate restraint. Alluding to the iconic IT database symbol of stacked disks, they present themselves as New & Improved This Millennium's Model, prepared to elbow their Web 2.0 points to the front of the line. The sharpened tips and honed razor-edge present clinical precision while the majority of the surface is scoured, dinged, and dented through years of hard persevering use. Inspired by industrial days-of-yore machinery - scarred, scuffed, marred and covered with a shop-worn patina of honest sweat. GCS is the first tool a master craftsmen reaches for and last one to be given up.

 

As a casual glance at this screenshot from the aging website, it's pretty plain and almost terminally non-descript. Perhaps no other color sez, 'programmer cautious' as this strong red-blue variation that is all-too common among web pages. Adding to user tedium was how entire topic branches were duplicated under additional menus to satisfy obscure sales issues to the detriment of understanding the company's business goals.

In re-designing the GCS website one concept became the driving force behind interface and information presentation: simplicty.
The archetypal Black-Box metaphor gained traction as we worked through site layout and graphical representation issues. GCS functions as an 'auto-magical' tech-tool that keeps troublesome issues from growing and causes crisis problems disappear. We believe the web site came to reflect this business reality.

For the site design a spare + lean, almost antiseptic sting, had to imbue both code and art or this couldn't be considered a winning design. The core values that had made this business a success should be clearly understood at every level from the sublime to overt. This art+logic synthesis is the F+F guiding force for almost two decades of product development delivering long-lasting designs that require minimal upkeep. We brought all our skills and goals to the table on this site.
The GCS site had devolved since it was launched - as so often happens when a startup succeeds - and looking a tad dowdy with all manner of seams showing and info branches sprouting rather organically: Time for some topiary.
Wielding metaphorical shears, F+F cut to the nub until the HTML tables and deprecated FONT tags were shorn. We whittled further at the HTML with a wee bit of precise javascript and trusty CSS with one side of our heads even as we polished these pixels into ultra-compatible 1980's-era .GIF files with that other lobe. The result is an extremely lean, clean, and almost universally compatible fluid-layout web design with a tiny 170K footprint. In fact, this GIF snapshot of the completed design is one-third larger than the entire redesigned GCS site.

The biggest design act was to make this site behave like a desktop application.
Like traditional software, when your dealing with GCS all activity happens within one, expandable-resizable, non-scrolling, multi-column window. This approach is a little old school for some, but by the F+F measure of usability having everything adjust to the viewport musts/needs/wants/lusts and/or fetishes all those some-bodies out there is vastly more important to discovery and retention of the client's communications.
Brace For Impact: The truth for on-line creation in these early days of the XXIst is that designers have absolutely no control over how a user will re-tune their browser display characteristics. All we can do is keep this in mind and provide flexible -strong- suggestions that keep browser variations in mind when crafting messages.

Using the angle of the original logo blade-edge to define some graphic elements and sticking with the colors and tones already established from logo development, you see a fluid multi-column design able to accommodate a number of screens and browsers with minimal upkeep. It doesn't _quite_ validate XHTML 100% , but also doesn't break layout in the major browsers and is quite sparse compared to verbose table-based formatting.
BTW - Validation is over-rated: what is meant to help make better code is too-often touted as the limelight of technical superiority {Hey, even the validator is buggy}.

For the Logo and site I chose the Myriad font family for it's clean modern lines with just an ever-so slight curve at the tops and bottoms of letter-forms - like a brush-stroke character - and flirts with the reasons to like a Serif typeface w/o the baggage. The CSS then deprecates to Delicious, a slightly jauntier version of the same lean modern thinking, and if a system doesn't have these fonts it's told to seek Futura, Helvetica, and then Verdana with increasing desperation until just Lucida Console is selected before a giving the OK to 'whatever' simple Sans-Serif font is the operating system's choice.
Form and Function cannot specify/demand/ask for Arial for the mutant bastardized Helvetica that it is.

 

On Stage

Everyone is in place, waiting for the final curtain-call, ready to be lit up by the limelight. Work was completed as the peak of the summer/fall holiday season flung all the parties to far-off regions and the GCS site remains as-is, pre- F+F uplift. However, our staging area is active and you can try the web design out for yourself if Grand Central Server hasn't published the design. Enjoy, psst, click the logo --->

 

 

 

DIV-ide and Conquer:
A technical nod must be given for the CSS positioning article 'Relatively Absolute', I found at Tommy Olsson's The Autistic Cuckoo which got me re-thinking how elements typically get defined, which was followed by a timely echo in 'Conflicting Absolute Positions' from Bob Swan at A List Apart which boiled the {ever-so non-standard} Internet Explorer fix down to one short javascript line per DIV...
Sh-sh-shweet!