New Site, New Logo, New Domain, Same Etch.

Like all design firms, it’s important that we have a trendy looking website to impress our clients, and provide us with topics to blog about.

Jim Ramsden
Author
Jim Ramsden
Published
May 5, 2018
Topics
Industry, Opinion

Since we set out in 2012, Etch has worked with dozens of Startups and Multinational companies to design and engineer Software. We’ve established long-term relationships with clients to help them improve and maintain their online services.

All of these connections were made thanks to a collection of hardworking pixels…

Our old site… now in the archives v2.etch.coOur old site… now in the archives v2.etch.co

This design landed us some awards, and got featured in a whole bunch of CSS galleries, because everyone thought that a grid of squares with some simple headings was the best thing since… 3 column layouts with a hero banner—still plenty of those around!

At the time, we didn’t realise how significant all this exposure was, but looking back now it’s something we’re quite proud of.

Our old site served us well, but after 5 years it was due a redesign.

New Site

We typically spend our time making things with lots of buttons and clever functionality, so it took a while for us to adjust to working on a content-focused project.

Good content takes hard work, too!Good content takes hard work, too!

Our content is divided into two sections; Team, and Work. These words encompass the core offering of our little company — you get an experienced team with the knowledge and skills to produce great work.

Also, by structuring our content this way, we’ve stayed away from the standard template; About, Services, Portfolio, Contact… yawn.

Even though the new site only has two sections, it still took a long time to create it—when you’ve got less content, the way it’s presented has to be on point.

A lot of time and energy has been spent on:

  • Copywriting to find interesting words to communicate our personality.

  • Refining animations to ensure they render at a good frame rate.

  • Optimising SVGs and animated GIFs to balance quality with file size.

  • Hiding dozens of easter eggs for nerdy people to find.

PWA FTW

We used all our favourite tools—React, GraphQL, Service Workers—to build a site that has all the hallmarks of a Progressive Web App. It works offline, it works without JavaScript, it works on mobile, it just works™.

These characteristics produce noticeable speed improvements for users, and we’re pretty sure that Google has rewarded us for it too—seeing a boost in our SERP rankings just a few weeks after the soft launch.

Gavyn McKenzie has written more about the development process.

New Logo

Our new logo has been out in the wild since 2017 when started using it on touchpoints, so it’s not brand new, but it still looks fresh!

When designing our new logo it felt important that it’s “DNA” should come from our old logo, so we used the triangle from the negative space and explored ways to create an “E”, “t”, “c”, and “h” by rotating and overlaying it.

In the end, we had to incorporate a few squares to ensure legibility, but the end result still feels pure and uncompromised.

Example on CodepenExample on Codepen

The best thing about having a geometric logo is that it’s easy to recreate with code, and we can have fun animating the crap out of it… yay, snazzy-whizz!

Highlight this sentence if you’d like to see a write-up of the logo design process.

New Domain

Finally, to give all these new codes a new home, we made the decision to spend $3,000 on “etch.co”.

At $500 per letter, it’s by far the most we’ve ever spent on a domain name, but think of all the time we’ll be saving from four less keypresses!

(Edit: Gavyn McKenzie has done the Math… it’s 48.66% less typing.)

We’ll probably take a kick in the Google button for dropping the “apps” keyword, but there’s something satisfying about a ‘brand-name-only’ domain.

Same Etch

Nothing else has changed really —our team features the same faces (just slightly more beardy), and we’re on the same mission.

New Hire

Actually there is one more new thing on the horizon… a person. We’re looking for a JavaScript Developer to join our team and help us make problem-solving software.

TL;DR

We’ve made a new website, but it’s 2018 and everyone’s got a new website, so you probably don’t care, but if you do, take a peak at etch.co