Our design philosophy is clarity. When it comes to finding the right way to express your message, we obsess.
Brick Media Lab is mostly Cantlin Ashrowan, a graphic designer, programmer and system administrator. Friends and freelancers often contribute on larger projects. In short, Brick bring a lot of skills to the table without needing you to subsidize our overheads. If you're a UK based developer and like our work, drop us an email.
We create, remake, improve and add functionality to websites. We design layouts, original artwork and, where required, entire identities. We create cool systems from scratch, like online shops, mailing lists, control panels, community services and blogs. We create supporting marketing, from business cards to posters to books to iPhone applications. We maintain servers, host files, register domains, give advice and solve problems.
We work exclusively with free, open source applications to create bullet-proof, future-proof, extensible systems. Design on the web is ephemeral, and staying fresh can be expensive. By leveraging the power of PHP and MySQL, we're able to build foundations that will last years after you've swapped out the graphic design. Interacting with external web services and APIs like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Fickr and many, many more lets us syndicate your content widely while saving you time maintaining your presence online. Standards compliant semantic XHTML provides firm footing for cross-browser compatibility, search engine optimisation and flexible CSS styling. jQuery animates our designs and handles asynchronous requests, adding flare and fluidity to our interfaces. We host our sites on Linux boxes running the apache2 web server, where we perform daily maintenance, meticulous logging and periodic backups.
Because of how much web development and design projects vary, it's very difficult to give a solid indication of what you can expect to pay. Web designers usually charge on the basis of a daily rate, which is typically somewhere in the vicinity of £150. Of course, even this is flexible, with larger commissions tending to attract discounts. This is further complicated by the presence of agencies, whose staff and overheads make costings more complicated. For the majority of our projects, we work out quotes based on the number of days we think the work will take multiplied by our daily rate of around £120.
On that basis, a simple three to five page static site would be likely to cost around £150, while a complex eCommerce solution could run to ten times that. Our consultations are completely free, and we'll be happy to give you some advice on getting the most out of your presence online (and how much it will set you back). If you're based in Edinburgh, a face to face meeting is the best way of talking through your requirements.
There's no shortage of web designers. Find a handful you like the look of, and drop them all a short email. You don't even need to include your project specs, a note of interest is enough to gauge their responsiveness. Once you've heard back from a couple, email them a list of your requirements. Try and be specific, but don't worry if you don't know exactly what you want or how to put it in the right language: they should ask any questions they need to before giving you a costing. Follow up any reasonable quotes with a phone call, or ideally a meeting, and give the job to whoever sounds like they know what they're talking about. We're confident that if you include us in that process, we'll impress.