Killer designs for
pixels or print.
Shark Attack is a little design studio situated in London (UK), started by designer Rick Lecoat.
The studio offers creative solutions for print and specialises in album sleeves and CD covers, together with clean, standards-based web design.
Recent events
Whilst uncompleted projects for the commercial sector cannot normally be discussed, hopefully the following entries will give some sense of what's going on in Shark Central at the moment.
Dom Mee website redesign
August 30th, 2008
Maritime explorer and all-round action man Dom Mee’s web site was badly in need of a face lift and some under-the-hood streamlining. With Dom about to be featured on CNN and anticipating a heavy increase in site traffic, it made sense to try and get the site rebuilt in time to coincide with the TV appearance. With only three days notice, Shark Attack redesigned the site and rebuilt it to web standards, getting the new version online in time for Dom’s CNN interview.
With the extremely tight deadline now out of the way, we are currently looking at converting Dom’s site to a dynamic blog-based format.
Launch of Nova-I.T. website redesign
July 19th, 2008
Nova-I.T. provide top notch IT training and development services to UK businesses of all sizes. Their earlier website provided visitors with useful content, but had been built several years ago and suffered from key usability and accessibility issues. Shark Attack stepped up to the plate and redesigned the site's underlying structure whilst keeping the overall look, which was tied to the clients existing identity.
The client was keen to retain the fixed vertical height used in the previous version, and so the new design uses an elastic layout that expands in proportion with the user's chosen text size. The result is a site, built to Web Standards, that can accept differing text sizes without breaking the layout and without losing the fixed width-to-height ratio that the client requested.
Shark Attack site update goes live
May 23rd, 2008
Like a plumber with leaky pipes, it's taken an age to get around to updating the Shark Attack web site. There always seems to be so much else to do: clients to delight, books to read, current design methodologies to keep abreast of… and of course the inevitable wall of admin that comes with running a business. Not to mention getting horribly addicted to The Apprentice. Again. But the update finally happened… sort of.
Actually this is something of a holding position (the MacUser article having kinda forced my hand, see below) whilst I find the time to complete a much more far-reaching under-the-hood redesign. That should see these four static pages transformed into a living, breathing, fully dynamic site.
In the meantime I'll keep updating this penny-racer edition with all relevant news. Stay tuned.
MacUser interviews Shark Attack
May 5th, 2008
A short while ago I was contacted by MacUser magazine asking if I would object to them profiling Shark Attack’s work in the field of record sleeve design for publication in a forthcoming issue. Of course I had no objections at all, and correspondent Richard Gooding duly contacted the studio for an interview. The resulting Q&A piece appears in MacUser Vol. 24, Number 11 (due in newsagents 23rd May). You can pick up a copy at your local news stand if you're interested, or you can always take out a subscription.
G5/Dual monitor bundle sold
May 1st, 2008
The PowerMac G5/dual monitor bundle recently advertised for sale on this very site has now found a new home. Thank you to everybody who enquired.
UNIC identity
April 3rd, 2008
Shark Attack recently completed a brand redesign for UNIC UK — a London-based building firm specialising in highly energy-efficient solutions in heating engineering, loft conversions and general construction. In keeping with the client’s green credentials, the redesigned stationery was printed onto recycled paper stock using a waterless printing press at Seacourt Limited in Oxfordshire.
A website, also to be designed by Shark Attack, is planned for later in the year.
Sharks and lawyers
March 15th, 2008
A prime example of a satisfied client giving the studio their ongoing business is the Metropolitan Police Service. Over recent years Shark Attack has catered extensively to their internal design requirements in both the printed and digital realms, and has just been asked to produce printed matter for an internal initiative by the Met’s legal directorate.
Cosmetic identity
February 12th, 2008
It’s always a pleasure to work with local SMEs, and so it’s especially gratifying to see that the number of local businesses requesting Shark Attack’s services seems to just keep increasing. Shea Natural tasked Shark Attack with creating a logo and designing the supporting printed materials for their new range of natural skin care products, with a web site design to follow later this year.
Perhaps, in this case, design really is just skin deep.
Software packaging
January 22nd, 2008
When Shark Attack designed the packaging for software development company 3am Solutions’ Autodesk add-on “Dynamite VSP” 2 years ago, the client was happy enough to call the studio back in to design 3am’s new product, “Dynamite SIM”.
The two products are both aimed squarely at CAD designers working in the area of civil design — creating complex road struxtures and the like. As such, you might be interested to learn that the ‘double circle’ logo was based loosely upon the Elephant & Castle roundabout system in south London.
