This week's award goes to:
   Double Aught, Inc.
 
We are honored to select Double Aught, Inc., as this week's recipient of the IPPA's Award for Design Excellence.

Double Aught Software is a game and multimedia design firm based in Brooklyn, New York. The company produces 3D worlds for Bungie Software, a high quality computer game production house in Chicago. The Double Aught online presentation mirrors their in-house work and creative energy to a tee. It is an inspiring, small piece of work that puts the company at the top of its field online.

There are only five main pages to this site, plus another half dozen pages of industry tips and pointers on the use of Forge, a Bungie Software 3D mapping program. Each page of the presentation is unique. The designers didn't fall into the trap of reusing the same template on every page. Don't miss the "us" page, with the photographs of the staff at Double Aught. If you haven't gotten the idea that these folks are creative and a bit off the edge, you'll make up your mind here.

We should call special attention to their links page, under the title, "friends." This is the best link list strategy we've seen to date and indirectly proves the value of having a full domain name for any commercial presentation. Just look at the composition of the screen, timing of the animation, and simple approach to what is usually a tired old page. They named the links page, "friends," no doubt, because if they had entitled it, "links," nobody would bother to go there.

Probably the neatest thing about this site is its layout strategy. The Web tends to be a horizontal medium. Everything from menu bars, to horizontal rules (toss them out -- we've always agreed with Dave Siegel on this), to the wider than high shape of the screen itself, undeniably pushes design into a horizontal construct. About the only vertical component of traditional WWW design is that content flows down the page. Double Aught went vertical with their imagery, broke the rules, and got away with it beautifully.

Even their restrained use of animated GIFs is impressive. They add a high energy feeling to the pages, building graphical appeal with a youthful design sense. The use of television signal noise is quite a good choice and is a bit reminiscent of MTV and VH1. David Carson did this in the early 1990s and it still looks good.

Typographic solutions dominate much of the design. Even the HTML-rendered text enhances the site's overall typographic appeal. Type, graphics, and layout merge into a single high impact presentation. The site is very well-conceived, very carefully planned, and very well-designed.

On the downside, the site falls far short of effective marketing, even though the graphics design component is exemplary. Frankly, it takes a few clicks to figure out what Double Aught really does. Perhaps they are still struggling with the commercial purpose of their WWW site.

If you look carefully, you can find this list somewhat far down on the first page: "sound art music writing design atmosphere visual audible mental bohemian construction." This fairly well sums up their work, if in a bit obtuse manner. It might have been better if they simply proclaimed something on the order of "graphics for quality game titles." I'm certain that they would argue that this would be terribly bland, but, come on, guys, "mental bohemian construction" doesn't really work either, although it does have a certain emotional pull.

Their composition even falls short in capturing potential new clients. Just try e-mailing the folks at Double Aught. On the bottom of the first page, you'll see the text, "maintained by ydnar." That's a clickable MAILTO link, as you would expect, and it does go to the company, but you know it goes to a webmaster's mailbox. This company is small enough that everyone probably talks in any case, but "Contact Us" would have been more direct and obvious. Even something like, "inquiries to ydnar at 00" would have worked without sacrificing too much poetic edge. Along these same lines, why not make the photographs on the "us" page clickable e-mail links to each of the staff.

On the technical side, Double Aught demonstrates a mastery of the forms of HTML and graphics. Their coding is superb. You will even find comment notes to aid in future page modification. Their strength with rendering GIF images for the 72 dpi medium of the WWW is clearly a result of their experiences in the realm of computer game graphics.

You will note that Double Aught sets type in absolutely tiny point sizes, yet preserves enough quality to keep it legible. The best method to achieve this is to initially set the type in Photoshop at larger sizes, roughly 18 point or higher, and then resize it with the Scale function to a smaller level (remember to hold down the shift key to retain proportions). The alternative, setting it at 4 point directly, is a common error among Photoshop novices and even among a few professionals. Going directly to small point sizes creates an anti-aliasing effect between and around letters that makes the copy unreadable -- quite literally, the letters flow together and become a blurred smudge.

All in all, Double Aught deserves a salute for their extraordinary site, along with perhaps a little kick to let them know that they have missed the boat in the marketing department. They've only been online since early October, however, so you can expect a lot of changes as they feel out the medium. This is probably a good place to bookmark and visit every month for the next year.

   Scoring (10 is Maximum):
   Graphics Design........ 9.4
   Programming............. 8.4
   Content and Copy..... 6.9

Check out the Previous DX Award Winners to see other top quality examples of online commercial design.
 
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