Beauty: GKAD – Architects – Interfanatic Customer Spotlight
This week, we celebrate our customer GKAD. We chose GKAD because they embody and the Interfanatic Quality of this week, which is beauty. Their architecture is beautiful in so many ways.
GKAD – Goeckmann & Kleespies Architects, of Frankfurt, Germany, are incredible architects who see their task from a very different perspective. They don’t just create beautiful architecture and beautiful spaces. They don’t just create functional architecture and functional spaces. They make beautiful, functional architecture that is functionally profitable for the owner. It’s not just architecture, it’s not just design. It’s profitable architecture and design with an eye toward improving the spending habits of the customers who enter the building and space.
And that’s why the Buckminster Fuller quote of the week is perfect. Their solutions are not simple on the inside, but GKAD’s architectural solutions certainly appear simple to their clients and to the customers who use their clients’ businesses. They just work.
GKAD Architects: Goeckmann & Kleespies Make Beauty
The team at GKAD is phenomenal. They make beautiful. Beautiful things, beautiful places, beautiful business.
GKAD’s specialty is high-frequency architecture. These are restaurants and shops in train stations, airports, and in city centers. Their architecture is experienced by many tens or hundreds of thousands every year. But those hundreds of thousands may miss the subtleties GKAD’s customers do not: the architecture invites people to spend.
GKAD’s designs bring high-dollar customers, and they bring those customers to spend even more. GKAD employs colors, geometry, and layout to keep people in front of the high dollar items and make those high ticket items more inviting to buy.
It’s genius. Pure and simple. And that genius is beautiful.
So next time you’re in the market for outstanding and beautiful architecture that will influence your bottom line, look to GKAD.
Beauty: An Interfanatic Quality
“If the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
We constantly seek the simple approach. Right there, I just did it. My mind said, “we are constantly seeking the simple approach”, but my simplicity trigger went off. “We seek” is simpler than “we are seeking”, yet they mean about the same thing. And this is something we do in every project. What is the most simple approach? It is likely the most effective and the most beautiful.
Sometimes great complexity is required to make something seem simple. Sometimes a great deal of thought and pairing down went into finding the simple, beautiful solution. We’re all ways looking for the simpler way. We’re always looking for the more simpler, yet more interesting way. Interfanatic always seeks the most beautiful way to celebrate our subject.
Interfanatic Service Focus: Interfanatic The Works Design
Last week, we showed how we simplified a customer’s site. This week, we describe how we made something complex simple and beautiful.
This is not a Wix site. GKAD.de is a bespoke design you have never seen before. It is beautiful, and it is simple, but the beauty is in the details. We created this site design with one of the best designers. We worked it over using our best UI people. We found simplifications and efficiencies. Then we applied it to a very fast server, such that the heavy home page video load would seem lightweight even on mobile.
The result is a beautiful website with layers of design and detail – just like GKAD’s architecture.
I think their site is beautiful even though it’s not the original design concept we imagined. Sitting with Ivo Goeckmann, principal of GKAD, I had the idea to begin a short video from the same perspective of all three stages of a project: with the blueprints of a building they created, then animate it into an artists technical rendering of those blueprints, then animate that into a a live video of the architecture in use. Sadly, it was not to be – GKAD overruled me and came up with these interesting animation videos, which are very cool.
“The result of our website design process for GKAD is a beautiful website with layers of design and detail – just like GKAD’s architecture.”
The site has a number of interesting touches, from the home page videos, to the animated icons, to the animated menu, to the animated waterglass that fills as you fill out the contact form. All this and more make for a website design you will not see anywhere else. It is beautiful, and it is unique. And, most importantly, it is effective – just like their architecture.
One thing that is missing from this project though: SEO. They did not want their site to be found! They deal with very exclusive customers, and they only want their site to be found on their personal reference from a business card. It was strange to avoid one of our key talents and skills, SEO, for this project. But, that’s what the customer wanted, and that’s what works best for them. So of course, we were happy to accommodate.
We can do design at just about any budget. But we love working on projects that, like GKAD, require a statement.
Interfanatic: We’ll Be There, and At Times That’s All the Beauty You Need.
Earlier this week, we were notified that one of the pieces of software we employ had a vulnerability, and needed to be updated immediately. So we dropped everything and updated that software immediately. This didn’t lead to any extra charges, it’s part of our management.
A client recently called. They needed help. We helped them. It didn’t cost them any extra. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But that client wasn’t use to it. That client was used to not getting a call back, or getting a million reasons why they couldn’t be helped. These are the stories we here all the time.
These are the stories we work hard to avoid. We’re here for you. And if you know anything about this business, you know that’s a beautiful thing.
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