Designing an architecture and design website is all about visuals, and the Porcelaingres website is a good example: the company’s porcelain stoneware tiles are visually presented with skilful, elegant use of forms, colours and graphics consistently arranged in harmony with the company’s brand identity.
Evocative visuals, unusual deviations, clearly expressive photographs: all these “morphological” features are essential to an architecture and design website, beyond the information provided in the text and the underlying technicalities.
The printed page is a reassuring two-dimensional space in which all components (titles, text, photographs, indexes) are based on the expectations of a system of symbols rooted in the reader’s consciousness: but on the web, the user is above all a spectator, and only if persuaded or at least made curious right away will he or she consciously participate in the experience of the information provided.
Visual design is therefore the key to construction of an online project: the organisation of visual elements goes hand in hand with the perceptive (or, in the broadest sense, emotional) aspects involved.
If the website is designed as a visual experience, however limited the viewing time, these elements are not wasted: the Porcelaingres corporate website is an excellent example of overall use of space and “plasticism”.
On the current homepage, a small number of square graphic elements direct the eye toward a selection of photographs made up of repetitions of the same geometric shape in individual images.
Renunciation of all concessions to the “spectacular”, made clear by the fact that all elements are coloured in shades of grey and by the soft hues and sobriety of the website’s internal layout, is consistent with the overall design: favouring homogeneity, elegance and clarity, the outstanding features of the company’s porcelain stoneware collections.
Marco Privato
1. Clyfford Still Museum - Denver, USA. Project: Allied Works Architecture.
2. ARCHIZINES (Milan, 2012), exhibition/research project on avant-garde architectural publications.
3. Museo Felix Nussbaum, Osnabrück, Germany, 1994. Project: Daniel Libeskind, irregular geometries and experimentation with new visual idioms.
4. Porcelaingres - Just Beige collection
5. Screenshot from the "Product Design" section of the Porcelaingres website, March 2012.
6. Porcelaingres – Nature collection
7. Refraction House Project: Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama, Japanese theoretician of digital spaces.
8. Details of corporate website: Bürobauten, Buehr Architekten BDA, Cologne, 2007
9. Porcelaingres – Sandstein collection
10. Porcelaingres – Fossil collection
