8/7 Central presents: how to rebrand an architecture firm

We heard this week from the boys ungendered nouns at 8/7 Central, who sent along a couple of new projects. Let's handle them one at a time, because there is so much to talk about here.

First off, did you know local architecture firm G.E. Wattier is now Slingshot Architecture? We didn't, either.

And thank the gods of design because their old logo, name, and splash page were A. awful and B. completely uninformative. We've seen the logo all over the metro and never really connected with the fact they were an architecture firm.

8/7 Central eases us all into the transition with a nice drop-down over the old site at gewattier.com:

Oh, how classy. It makes us feel all warm inside about this shake up. Now, on to the new site:

As is often the case with 8/7 Central's new design, much of the news is about how awful the old design was. It's not that the new site isn't slick, well-made, or intuitive -- it's just that it's so much easier to focus on the negative, isn't it? Today, in celebration of the talent that is 8/7 Central's team of robots designers, developers, and copywriters, let's review the success of this site, point by point.

1. That logo. We begin here because we are sure this will be the most contentious point, but the backwards/forwards treatment of "slingshot" works for us. Does it work for you?
2. The tone. The text, the photo, the text overlay ON the photo -- they all communicate quite clearly that this is a firm who wants to care about what they do -- and they want us to know they care. Though after we've stared at the front page for this long, the folks gathered around the conference table do look a little too serious for architecture. They begin to look as if they are handling a much more serious situation.
3. Information underload. The pixies gentle designers filled the page with just enough -- not too much. Often new sites suffer from wanting to tell us too much at first glance.

How's all this new golden architecture goodness striking you today?