Design

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs

Design at Four Clouds isn’t just window dressing, but an integral part of a product’s function. For that reason, design is a part of our process from the beginning. Development and design happen in a collaborative environment where each feeds off of and builds on the other. This process provides unified results that work better because of our focus on design as part of our development cycle.

User Experience & User Interface Design

Design and proper development strategy are a good base for every project. However, to reach their fullest potential, the end user’s experience of your product needs to be at the top of your priorities. For this reason, user experience (UX) design is another integral part of our design and development process. The user experience is where products are made or broken, regardless of function, beauty, or uniqueness of concept. Too many times user experience is tacked on to the end of a project, but with our integrated approach a project’s potential users are always on our minds throughout the entire process.

Graphic Art, Design, & Illustration

Our design brings an artist’s eye and an illustrator’s visual problem solving skills to every project. Beauty and usability go hand in hand, because a more aesthetically pleasing product is far often easier to use. This is especially true when the design of a product is part of its development. At Four Clouds it’s not form follows function, it’s form and function, intertwined to create a unified solution.

Stunning graphics go a long way towards separating your project from a sea of mediocrity. Products that just do their job are no longer enough, they need to look good inline with their function to really succeed in today’s mobile and web market.

Web Design

Design has a language, and that language must be fluently spoken to allow for the full range of subtleties and nuances. In our work for the web, we might deploy a variety of custom or semi-custom solutions (which you can read about in our Develop section), but at their core is fluency with standards-based HTML for structure, CSS for layout and design, and JavaScript for experience and magic. We use best practices for each so that your web site or app is accessible on the variety of platforms available today, while looking towards the future of touch interfaces and mobile devices.

Design for iOS & Mobile Devices

We believe the best computer is the one you have with you, and looking around at a crowd of people today, it’s easy to see why we give special focus to the mobile world of smartphones and tablets: nearly everybody has one. They are increasingly important in a wide range of businesses and professional services. The power of mobile is more than just portability. The best apps and responsively-designed websites offer a custom experience that truly transforms each device from a small computer into the full experience of that app or site. A calculator app makes your phone a full-fledged calculator. A reading app makes your tablet into the world’s smallest fully stocked bookstore. These transformative experiences get us excited about the mobile world. Our focus on design and development partnerships and expertise in what makes mobile work put us in a unique position to deliver your best solutions.