Method.

Method has a new website – and first of all: I like it a lot.

Back in the days, the old black and white Method website was one of my favorite agency websites (they had it at least until 2003, says archive.org). I liked the way they were so clear about what they do, how they achieved to communicate very well on different levels and being very appealing design-wise, although it was “just white and grey text on black background”. In my opinion a good example of a content-driven design, yet avoiding to be just another minimalism stereotype. Focus on their work and their method, no distractions, but without the website design itself being too reduced and –as many other examples– just boring.

The next version of their website was full Flash as far as I remember. I did not pay too much attention to it – not because it was Flash, I just thought it looked a bit too generic and to me personally, it didn’t fully feel like Method. I just tried to link back to the site or take a screenshot, which does not work since the old Flash detection always redirects to method.com, showing the current website.

Well, I think the current redesign is another Wow finally. Again very content-driven, clear and with a highly appealing visual design. I like the quite sublime and charming concept of featuring people and their statements as short built-in video interviews, where answers are given to questions that are not explicitely (and not necessarily) being posed. But I mainly like the focus on the design of the website’s behaviour – which to me does not feel Technology-driven at all (not reloading pages and using opacity fading for transitions is en vogue). I think it is best shown in the way the grid of teaser boxes behaves according to resizing the Browser window – a topic quite many designers and web developers are agonizing over these days:

Now just get rid of the horizontal scrollbar. And the text zooming behaviour could be improved (I know this criticism is very nerdy and anal, but these are the things that stick out with those close-to-perfect examples ;-):

Back to work.