Visual design for the web is a process that requires understanding what needs to be expressed, dreaming up creative ways of expressing it, and establishing a set of specifications and constraints to weigh in the necessity of balancing form and function with the procedural architecture that drives a site.

It's important to allow visual ideas to evolve. With this in mind we allow for between two and three design cycles on our projects. This not only offers our clients a sense of involvement with critiques — it often helps those who approach us with an 'I know it when I see it' approach to express themselves fully, giving us a better chance to arrive at a solution they can be proud of.

Aesthetically we believe that it is impossible to place form over function, or visa versa. Visual design breathes life into the code that enables it, and strong code ensures that what a visitor gets is more than just a pretty face.

All our designs begin as photoshop comps and design notes. From there it's on to flow charts, and sometimes even a storyboard and pseudo code to express the user interface and 'tell the story' about the different experiences we will be crafting when a visitor comes to a site. Once a visual approach is decided on we go through the process of bringing it to life.

Wherever possible we define our layouts and typography in clearly and well designed CSS, which creates a touch more work upfront but which ensures that a site is directly suited to the style guide that is generated for it and also produces a 'pipeline' for doing cross browser testing. While the web is increasingly embracing standards it has also become more complicated. All of our projects go through a platform testing and debugging phase to make sure our sites reach as many people as possible looking the way they were intended!