To coincide with some big changes that have been happening with our little company over the past few months, designko.com.au, the online home of Designko has undergone a facelift to enable us to better showcase our wares online. As of July 2009, Designko began to expand. This expansion has given us the opportunity to take the business further than we’d been able to previously. You will also notice that we have trademarked the DK fish logo to further cement our brand.

We are delighted to have been able to employ the services of part-time contractor and friend of DK, Craig Stewart in a full time web development role. Craig brings many years of web development experience with him. After stints in leading eLearning and digital agencies in Sydney, we’re happy to have him here and working closer to home. Even more attractive for Designko and our customers is the experience Craig brings working with the Business Catalyst system, the platform that our SiteFusion solution runs on.

Having a full-time developer on site means that Brendon can now concentrate fully on what he loves to do and that is print and web design, the foundation that he has built the business on.

At Designko, our focus has always been on creating a great product that is visually pleasing, and we have designed this site to showcase some of the fantastic work we’ve produced. As you can see from the new site, Brendon has drawn inspiration from some of the great minimalist sites doing the rounds on the web at the moment, added his own touch to it and thrown in a few development challenges for Craig to test his skills on.

Since we’ve spent so much time looking forward at where we’re going over the past few months, we thought it would be fun to go back through some of the iterations of designko.com.au to see where we’ve been. It has been a little bit like looking at your old school yearbooks there’s the obligatory mullet shot, but fortunately, not too many zits, or crooked teeth. Here are some of the highlights from the DK archives.

Designko – 2004

Got good value out of some stock imagery, but were already off and running with our first steps into dedicated hosting, domain name registration and printing. Our logo was designed to be simple and effective, but was still a bit of a work in progress at that stage.

Designko – 2006

Drawing inspiration from the floral styles that were quite popular at the time, this version of the site was a nice clean design that began to pave the way for future iterations. We were also right into utilizing flash elements in our designs at this stage also, yep, that menu is built in flash! The logo here is beginning to show signs of things to come, building on the use of DK as a brand. We began to experiment more with typography and using fonts in branding.

Designko – 2007 – Version 1

This was a busy year for the company, with Brendon welcoming his first child into the world, quite obviously this gave a bit of inspiration to his designs and advertising in the early parts of 2007. Yep, that’s a picture of a young child number one on the homepage hero image. Still using the flash menu from the previous site, we see the ‘DK fish’ logo for the first time.

Designko – 2007 – Version 2

Here again, there is still a bit of floral inspiration in the site, but there is more of a focus on presentation of our products in a more professional and solid manner, the business had begun working with Business Catalyst at this stage and was looking to really market this solution to our clients. The site design is quite clean, allowing for the content and products to speak for themselves.

Designko – 2008

This was our website up until now. This site had developed somewhat from the version back in 2004. Our client list had grown and we had a great body of work to showcase with some fantastic designs and colours being utilized.

All in all, we think we’ve developed a solid body of work and have helped to break new ground for our clients visually and created some great online strategies. We are looking forward to the future and some of the exciting clients we’re putting together work for at the moment.