A friend recently invited me to provide IA and visual design for A. B. Smeby, an artisanal bitters manufacturer in Brooklyn, NY. The site is up, and I’m happy to have been involved with such a cool little enterprise.

It’s a small (one-page) site, but I did do a quick wireframe for it.

You can click the wireframe to make it bigger.

The wireframe helped to define where things went, what those things were, page width, icon needs and placement, product shot needs and placement, number of columns, links, and copy. It also helped my development partner to gauge whether the ideas I came up with were within development and maintenance scope.

This was the second wireframe I did for the project; the first one implied a design that was way out of scope. Wireframes are a great sanity check.

Sometimes I show these to clients, sometimes I don’t. In this case–since we had arrived at a one-page site, and the visual design was more than half the impact–I didn’t. It was just a means of defining the work to be done on my end.

Here’s the final product (click to see detail).

If you compare the screenshot with the wireframe, you can see how the design evolved.

A note on the site’s visual style: the client had requested a design that followed the current revival of interest in old-fashioned type and Victorian flourishes. This was a great fit for the brand, which is all about old-fashioned production methods. For this design, I researched bottle labels from the Victorian era. The yellow in the banner is from an 1890s Chinese ink bottle label, and the typography is related to the look of an old bitters label from 1900 or thereabouts.

I suggest you order some bitters. They’re tasty.