Duotones

Our name “Duotones” is coming from the print-process Duotone, and we have different reasons why we chose it. One is our love for graphic design in all its variations, another the traditional quality we wanna bring into our modern website project and also the love for music is part of the decision. The inspiration that music gives us. We didn’t name our company but rather named us as Duotones.

Due to part of the Name “tones” we wanted to bring this aspect into the Design, the Idea mainly is, that our Websites illustrates some sort of amplifier for the frequency of the eye (which also is our claim). Bring us your business idea, your company or your band, and we’ll be this amplifier who turn everything into the frequency of the eye. By the footer of the websites, we’ve symbolized this, where we’ve plugged glasses in the visual output.

We have a huge interest in using qualitative materials, like wood for example, that will last long and also have a small footprint to our nature. That’s why we use recycled paper for our corporate design, and also brought this to the website, so we can show to the world, that it has not to be always clean white paper, to create something beautiful.

All this we brought together in our concept, and started doing hand-sketches and mock-ups of our amplifier, but we soon realized, that writing directly on the amp, would be uncomfortable for the visitors to read, because it would be white letters on black background. So we negotiated about rather having a white amp or our final choice, the paper in front of it, which also gives the content “air” to its sides and doesn’t give the impressions of being held in a cage.

Finally we designed all the graphics in photoshop and illustrator, added this vintage look, of the time, we belive, everything was crafted to endure forever, like that old amp, that still gives us that warm sound, or the analoque Leica camera, older than myself, and still shooting pictures. Before the time, when products where manufactured to only endure a short time, to encourage customers to buy something new every two years or earlier.

We used LESS for CSS and Ajax to give the navigation-handle time to rotate. We wanted usability for our visitors, this was far more important to us than having a perfect SEO website. We wanted our visitors to feel how to use our website immediately, even if they’re not using the internet everyday, by giving them a user-interface they already know.

Designer: Marcel Hadorn Duotones LLC
Country: Switzerland