Styledent is a Dental Clinic in Santiago, Chile, whose customers are mainly people from the domestic showbiz with a rather “refined” profile, between their 30’s and 40’s. My client asked me to do the whole concept design starting up from zero for he wanted to change completely the business identity the clinic had before: logotype, slogan, business cards, web site, etc. I proposed him then we should give Styledent a very delicate profile almost as if offering a beauty service more than a “doctor” type of thing, so as to look somehow elegant but not old, delicate but not feminine (since the target market was also men), and sophisticated but not too classy. Besides, for what I saw, most people that visited the clinic didn't really go there for too complex dental procedures, but rather for whitening or small porcelain fixes.
My client agreed, since the idea also matched one of the first conditions he put for the project: to make Styledent’s image identity completely different from the regular dental clinic, and to get away from the so hospital looking web pages he had seen all the time when it came to dental care. So I began observing certain textures like velvet or fine suede on which I inspired the making of the interface. But I also needed for the imagery to recall somewhat the dental care part of it without being too obvious though.
So I chose different elements as the x-rays, some dental tools and also some paper sheets and threw them on top of the velvet-like material to achieve different compositions. So the “spirit” of the web site was to always have pretty much the same elements present: the girl, the sheet, the tapes, the x-ray, the pins, etc. but they’d be moving around and rearranging into a different composition every time the user would click on a different item of the menu – Of course, motion is a condition for most of my web site design projects for I do believe surfing the web should be a experience different from reading a book or a magazine. The world is not stiff and therefore the Internet shouldn't be eigther. Unless you are to read documents or blogs like this one you're reading right now in which the main purpose is to have you comprehending a certain subject. In the case of commercial web sites, motion is also a good device that helps me keep every visitor interested in surfing it, for we all know that the capabilities of people to concentrate on regular reading has become much lower in the recent decades.
But after all the motion and rearranging thing, it still looked too flat. So I sent my photographers to the clinic to see if they could capture some broad spaces that I could use to give more depth of field to the compositions I had worked on already.
The place was fine, but it looked too much like a clinic still, so we focused only on the objects we found there that didn’t looked as white or dull as the regular "world" of dentists. So we picked fine flooring, bluish artifacts for whitening, some blue room we found there, etc, and I rebuilt them into a 3D projection the way I needed. Well, here are the results. These are just a a few screen shots from Styledent’s official web site and some other promotional work (rather printed). Guess it met the goal and, of course, the budget previously determined. ‘Cause we designers know that no design work should ever be measured only by a esthetical judgement, but upon three main aspects instead: commercial objectives, budget and time. One has to meet the objective goal, at the lesser time, using only the resources taht the budget allows. So one just tries to do the best posible upon the circumstances. If you visit the site www.styledent.cl, and decide to send a comment on the form, you'll see a quick animated surprise that activates once the message goes through.
