Corporate Risk Watch
link Friday 14th of November, 2008
Inspiration comes from the strangest places.
I'm not going to rip into the meaningless corporate jargon which passes for content on this site, as others have done, just say that the design is extremely memorable, and right up my street. The heavily locked-down grid, thoughtful typography and bold navigation styles are obviously excellent, and are the first thing you'll notice when you click through. But I'm just as taken with the subtle way that CSS underlines are dropped in favour of big, uneven lines, and that the background is just ever so slightly textured with a barely noticeable 'noise'. It's these little touches that stop the rigidity of the layout from overwhelming the site, giving it a little bit of depth. I'm currently very interested in adding small handmade touches to much more 'artificial' layouts, and you should see this coming up in some of my future work.
It's particularly refreshing seeing such a bold site design coming out of such an unashamedly corporate site. When I started work on the current version of the K International site, the first thing we decided was that there would be no stock images of smiling business types or pretty girls with phone headsets on. That was a small measure, but pick any large company you can think of, head over to their site, and I can virtually guarantee you'll find this kind of non-content on pretty much every page. Seeing a site like this breaking the mould in such a huge way is extremely heartwarming, and I can only hope that those who spend money on "mitigating risks in the areas of compliance, business transaction, legal disputes and competition" will agree with me.
One gripe — the site goes downhill very rapidly once you knock the browser text size up a notch or two. In many cases, this is totally avoidable — the underlines in particular can be fixed without changing the markup or image files, simply by amending the .bigUnderline class in the stylesheet. I tested it myself using Firebug, and changing the placement of the background image (and setting it to repeat-x ) fixed it immediately.
Comments - 3 so far
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Daniele. Tuesday 2nd of December, 2008.
Just fixed the underline problem, thanks!
Flavio Curella. Tuesday 2nd of December, 2008.
Hi,
I'm the developer of the website, and I wish to thank you from the whole team for your nice review.
About the gripe, I fixed, so I thank you once again for spotting this bug.
Andi. Wednesday 3rd of December, 2008.
Hi guys,
Congratulations again on the amazing site - you should be really proud of that one. Glad I could be of assistance (in a very small way).
Take care, Andi