BrainBakery.com Designs from the Past 25th May 2008 | BY JofArnold | FILED UNDER 'AJAX, JavaScript, Wordpress, design'

At BrainBakery we specialise in PHP, MySQL, AJAX and other web technologies, but occasionally we do a bit of design for our clients and our own web apps; for example, the sumo.tv facebook app was one we had full design reign over. However, for the most part we partner with design expert friends of ours like Caffeine Hit and Display Digital. But we’re a big fan of tinkering with designs, so specialising in code sometimes leaves us with a vacuum of design lust.. which is invariably sated by re-designing the BrainBakery site a few times a year.

What follows is a gallery of some of our old and more well-loved designs for BrainBakery.com:

BrainBakery The First

Ah, the nostalgia of a hastily-sketched holding page! BrainBakery was founded in 2006 as a business vehicle for some advanced web development projects we were working on at the time. As we weren’t thinking so much about digital agencies at the time, we knocked up the little beauty as a temporary measure.

BrainBakery Ajax Mode

One of first projects involved the now-classic “web operating system”, with moveable, draggable, resizeable windows within a web page. This inspired us to make the site highly customisable by the user. However, whilst modern AJAX/JavaScript web interfaces are great for some users, they are poor for users with visual disabilities and poor for search engines. This is why we wrote a bespoke back-end that would automatically generate static versions of the pages which would be displayed to browsers (and search engines) without JavaScript.

BrainBakery Widescreen

The previous site looked great, but there wasn’t a great deal of useful information to catch the eye. We decided to re-configure the site to include a little bit more information. The code was essentially the same, as were my icons I’d designed from the previous version. We don’t tend to make a song and dance about our icon design skills, but we think they still look great after nearly two years!

BrainBakery iPhone 2.0 (Unfinished)

Inspired by an iPhone we played with at Future of Web Apps, we tested out some highly minimalist glassy, glossy iPhone-like web designs. Great fun, but we couldn’t get the design to be minimalist and yet have lots of information - as we need in a site like this. That one went the way of the dodo.

BrainBakery Blog (what you are looking at now)

Imagine the scene - you’ve been procrastinating about updating your site with all your latest and most exciting projects, never quite finding the time, and then all-of-a-sudden you are featured on Techcrunch.com (the world’s leading web tech blog!). It was a golden opportunity we couldn’t miss, so we put together all our wordpress design fu to produce the blog you see now in approx 6 hours! It’s a bit rough around the edges, but if nothing else it proves how fast we can be.

In fact, we’ve done some very interesting things with Wordpress lately. Watch this space for some developments!