Recent Web/Interactive Work:
[Specto Design] took on our web site project and in a span of 4 months [they] led our company through a major rebranding process. Marla and the team she led at Specto Design consistently exceeded our expectations in terms of the level of creative as well as technological savvy. She guided us through every step of the process and led us through a very successful launch.
Application Development Projects:
Excerpts from Specto's Design Bible:
Form without content is useless:
Without mediating information, and without any real entertainment, a visually otherwise perfect page is not so perfect after all - it is actually a disaster, and no one who has visited it, comes back a second time. If you have nothing to offer except a few cool screen fills we have a classic style over substance situation.
Content without form is boring:
Without meaningful structuring information into small digestable units and without loosening it up with graphics or multimedia elements, symbols or illustration effect, the gathering of information on the screen is tiring and annoying. Web screens do not compare to book pages.
Navigation is in:
A web project with a lot of informational content is first and foremost a hypertext project, and the impression which it leaves with the user has a lot to do with whether it is simple to retrieve the requested information, if it is fun to spend time on this site, to see if it is easy at any time to branch out to other parts of the site as well as finding your way back where you came from. Web design is at least as much use case and navigational design as graphic design.
Browser and platform independence is highly desired:
While a conventional designer knows in advance whether his design will be placed on a coaster or a poster on the wall, web designers do not know what display devices will be used. In most cases, better designs are easy, with clear, simple forms, good color contrasts, and no excessive widths and heights. Even smaller groups such as visually impaired users should be considered in any form whatsoever.
The Web belongs to the Internet:
A web site has not only to look as good as possible, it should also have as little bytes. CCS based coding of the html pages reduces source code size as well as readibility and ease of maintenance. The fact that connection speeds for online users are gradually getting better, does not mean to create heavy pages irrespective of the network traffic. Other things must be considered as well. Good, meaningful descriptions and keywords in the meta-information is equally important for the success of a web page besides their visual impact. Because a web page will not only visited by people, but also of programs that they consider the Internet search engines to index.