The New Poke Website

If you hadn’t already yet guessed by the title, Poke have a new website. It’s a big leap from Poke’s old site (which is what you’d expect seeing as it was designed back in the early naughties). Working in a digital design agency myself I know how hard it spend time getting your own site up to scratch and our site has needed a complete overhaul for quite a while – so I congratulate the Poke guys in getting a site up which represents them well.

Anyway, here are some of my observations…

Background

A nicely crafted background based on the ‘P’ of Poke

and/or influenced by Nik Roope’s hulger phone (formerly Pokia)?!

Typography

Navigation typeface in Georgia (uppercase). Georgia is one of the nicest default fonts around – it has character and a nice form – works well for body copy too. (Also just noticed the heart separators in between section titles – nice little touch).

Headline font using sIFR. Due to the lack of decent default fonts its a good idea to use sIFR as it opens up your type choice 1 million fold. Not sure exactly what this font is but it’s big bold and has a commanding feel to it – stacks up nicely too.

This font reminds me of the TakTak site a bit, they use a similar kind of face with sIFR – although I do prefer this one, it has a nicer feel to it.

These are all really nice fonts but I don’t really see the need for them. It’s a bit of a font overload – if the idea was to have an eclectic feel then I don’t think it really works. It would make more sense to me if each category had its own typeface, then a user could identity a news story, project launch or fun stuff post immediately and still have an eclectic feel on the blog main page. I’d be interested to know what the thinking is behind this?!…

Layout

The site uses a three column structure and has probably been designed using a 12 column grid. This gives it a good, flexible base to work with.

Features

Spotlight style search
A really nice feature influenced by Apple’s spotlight search – searches the portfolio, blog posts and allows you to see all the results on one page.

Details

Home page
A web 2.0 style stretching blue band shows the ‘Sticky feature’ – highlighting the latest project launch, news story or fun stuff post.

Portfolio page
Nice clean neutral page lets the work stand out.

Project page
Nicely laid out Project pages with well written copy – almost has an editorial feel to it. The copy has a really nice tone of voice and gives you a good flavour of the project.

Blog post
Again incorporating the 3 column structure.

Overall I think this is a very good site – I think the key to its success is the way it incorporates a blog, Poke’s work and everything else in a fully integrated way. And even though they say…

It’s not perfect and there’s a few bits and bobs that we’re still working on, but we’ve heard that it’s OK for your site not to work. In fact it’s really uncool if your site isn’t in some kind of terminal beta.

Guys – It’s looking good!