openBC sketches (2)

It’s not the key task for the contest, but the current logo is painful. It is hard to imagine to do something reasonable without changing it. So i make some quick wins here.

There are already some new ideas in the opendesign logo i can reuse. The typeface used for „open” is a Futura bold with a decent negative tracking (around ‑60/1000), that looks a bit 80’s retro and far better than the current anemic extra-light extended. Because the „BC” in Futura does not look straightforward enough i use Franklin Gothic. The contrast between bold and light type is an in important characteristic of openbc and should remain.

The next design iteration is about making a better header and navigation – that’s the key. What openbc really needs is a simple, compact (regarding pixels and bytes), unique and robust header.

Visually robust, because OpenBC surely needs to change contents faster and more frequently in future. I think, they must try more in order to improve their site. For this, it makes life easier having something on top of the site that carries the brand – regardless what mess there is below.

To achieve the robustness i use a grey box for now, that’s the easiest way. In the allover layout, i made everything a bit more compact, the first draft was too loose and fluffy.

Again, anyone may feel free to download the psd file (2 MB) and reuse the design. Some rights reserved.

Next, i need some more fancy-design-details (Matt) and some more exciting contents…