The new García Media website is here, and we hope you like it. It has been in the makings for months, but you know how it is: With so many ongoing projects, our own website was not the priority. We had the direction planned about a year ago, but actually launching it took longer than expected. But now it is here!
This was a team effort. Reed Reibstein, our art director & project manager, was the lead designer and developer. Our García Media Europe senior art director, Constantin Eberle, worked closely with Reed on the design, and Mario Garcia Jr. and myself advised as well. Christopher Kennedy of One Bright Light provided technical assistance to upgrade and fully integrate our CMS, ExpressionEngine.
We should also note that this is only the first iteration of this website. Now that much of its design and development is in house, we look forward to enhancing the site and implementing new features over the coming weeks and months. It will be an ongoing process as we prepare new case studies, highlight interesting blog posts and fix any issues that may come up.
What's new?
Much has changed, but you will still find the familiar features that you are accustomed to.
The main new features are the following:
Responsive design
Our website is now responsive, adapting its design to your device. Responsive design is a focus in many of our projects, so we are glad to have a website that puts this valauble methodology to use.
More energetic look & feel
In terms of look & feel, we decided that we wanted this to be a colorful representation of the work we do. Blocks in a variety of hues now greet you when you first visit us, along with touches of color on each page.
We have ten color palettes that rotate each day. Each is inspired by the color palettes of specific García Media projects. You can see the origin on the day's palette at the bottom of each page. We look forward to adding new palettes as we launch new projects. So, for example, yesterday's color palette was from our work in Norway with Aftenposten, while today it is from our collaboration with Romania Libera.
Navigation
We have rethought our navigation to help you find what you're looking for more efficiently. We finally have a working search bar, and we will be tagging past and future blog posts and projects to make our content more accessible. With our contact form at the bottom of each page, we hope it will be easier for you to get in touch with us if you are interested in collaborating, would like us to speak at an event or simply want to say "hi."
The typography
We have concentrated on making our case studies and daily blog more pleasant environments for reading. A bigger text font, clear headings and larger images should make the blog worth reading each weekday. We are using Mercury ScreenSmart for text, Mercury Display for many headings, Ideal Sans for the lead blog post on the homepage and secondary headings and Tungsten for accents.
Let us know what you think
As all new projects, our new Garcia Media website continues to be work in progress. We plan to tweak it as we go in the weeks ahead, and to listen to your suggestions as well.
For now, this is a big change for us and one that we hope will be to your satisfaction. Thanks for visiting.
Next week, look forward to a more detailed case study of this project and a look back at the five previous iterations of our website.