Task 4

Who else is out there - how good are they?

I have used the SWOT analysis to evaluate various design studios that I admire and essentially, aspire to be like in the future. By doing this I have been able to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their business, which will benefit me as I can see what works and what they have missed out, giving me opportunity for improvement in the future. I feel that by combining strengths and areas of opportunities that I pick up on, I will have a strong idea of what makes a good practice / online portfolio.

The first design studio that I looked at was that of the New York based designer Mike Perry. Although I did look at it objectively, I actually found that their were a lot more strengths in comparison to the weaknesses. I have never noticed before how much information you do get, and it all seems to be written by the designers himself so it has a very welcoming, friendly atmosphere. Although I picked up a variety of strengths, two of my favourite things about the site were that, not only do you get to see images of the studio but also images of the actual designer, Mike Perry, meaning you can ‘put a face to the name’ but in addition to this, you can download a PDF of his portfolio which is something I noticed you couldn’t do on many other sites, or if you could, it wasn’t highlighted. Other strengths that I noticed were; the online store, the fact that he has a book published and how easy the site was to navigate.

I went on to look at ILoveDust, a UK based designed team. It seemed almost a shame that I had evaluated Mike Perry’s site first, because in the past I have been impressed this site however, this time I wasn’t really and I picked up on a lot more weaknesses that I expected. They are a multi-disciplinary, global award winning design studio with high profile clients such as Nike which are obviously impressive facts, one of the additional strengths that I picked up on was the location of their studio; they highlight that they are from south england in a ‘coastal location’ which means it is probably cheaper than being in a big city like London but they have convenient transport links to big cities. I felt the main weakness about this site was the speed; it was rather time consuming when trying to look through their portfolio as the images were quite slow to load. The other weaknesses that I picked up on for ILoveDust were very similar to those that I noted for the last website that I looked at.

The last team that I evaluated were Non-format, a globally acclaimed group with a large worldwide client base. They have got studios in europe and USA, have been established since 2000 and they have a hugely successful book published, however, I didn’t feel that their site did them justice. As previously mentioned, the weaknesses that I picked up on for ILoveDust and Non-format were very similar. Something that I thought was a great strength for Mike Perry was that he had an online store where you could be things directly from him, whereas the latter design teams didn’t. One other thing that I felt was a weakness for the last 2 design teams was the less ‘friendly’ atmosphere; the ILoveDust site was quite youthful in terms of colour etc., but there wasn’t any information about each seperate designer and although it says the studio is in a coastel location, we don’t know what it looks like. Similar to this, the Non-format site didn’t have any images of studios or designers, also, it seemed a lot more formal and ‘mature’ in comparison to Mike Perry’s site, however this doesn’t exactly seem to effect them hugely as they still have a large client base.