Abbey Road Studios (http://www.abbeyroad.co.uk/ )

Abbey Road Studios is a recording studio which handles various types of services such as recording & mixing, mastering, interactive expertise across all media formats such as blu-ray to web,and even asset management & supply. But their main service would be the recording & mixing, where they worked with some of the world's most celebrated artists, producers, composers and orchestras. Abbey Road Studios is the most famous recording studio complex in the world. The studios have been at the heart of the UK music industry for more than 75 years and have been the location of countless landmark recordings.

For their corporate website, it is obvious that they have fully used the corporate colour of the company which is manly black & white. The grid system is mostly consistent throughout the pages with abit of changes in some of the smaller contents.They gave a very simple, clean-cut website but added abit of edge to it with the availability of flash navigation in some of the pages. It adds abit of an interesting element to the website because user can also scroll through the flash navigation as a guide to the content in the website. For example in the Home page, they have given the user an option of seeing for information about their engineers, or they can read more about the various equipments they provide. They have also included an area below to place their updates of news, where user can read further more by clicking on it.

Eventhough the website has a square-ish feel to it and having mostly black & white, it does not feel as boring or too corporate looking as people would think it would be. In fact, it had made the website look even more slick and clean-cut, and it still has corporate look, but with an edge especially with the bits of flash navigation and control of typography throughout the website.

Leica Camera AG (http://en.leica-camera.com/home/)

Leica Camera AG is an international company in the optical industry, with its headquarters based in Solms, Germany, and a second location in Portugal. All products from the three divisions - Photography, Hunting Lenses and Nature Watching - have a shared mission: to deliver better images.

In their website, it was interesting to have the short flash video in the Home Page, where the user gets to introduced to the camera. They are also able to straight away be guided to the different cameras that Leica offers.

Eventhough the corporate colour is red and white, throughout the website they have just used the colour of white and grey, a really clean-cut and simplicity to it. They have the consistency of arrangements of the logo and the navigations, where the main navigation would be on top while the sub navigation would be at the left side. But because the background itself is the basic white and grey,and the logo is consistently in every page, the bright red & white would really stand out throughout the website so the user would know that that's the Leica corporate colour.

Basically the grid system works consistently throughout the content pages,except the Home page. The website is a really simple but pleasant looking, enough to deliver the content that they want towards the user.

Podspeakers (http://www.podspeakers.com )

Podspeakers is a company which produces good speakers with good designs. Podspeakers continues to impress HiFi enthusiasts with their unique design and impressive sound. What surprises most people is the fact that they were designed back in 1990 by a group of developers who were given the task of creating a set of untraditional speakers. The goal was to develop a high quality speaker with a unique design that people could afford to buy, and the result was astonishing – the Minipod series was born.

Throughout the whole website, the grid system is quite consistent in every page and the design of the content are consistent too, where the background design will always be a similar slick design and the content is centralized to fit without a long page.

Instead of having the boxes of the content area to be fully squared like the Abbey Road Studio website, they have made it to be a rounded corner box, to fully emphasize on their slick designs of speakers. For colours, they have used very limited colours of light grey,bright orange and abit of pale blue. This is because the colours that comes from their range of speakers would already catch the user's attention and would further attract the user to it.

I like how they would always have the area specifically saved for a flash banner area to show the different of speakers they have in most of the pages, and it's interesting as to how they would change the picture following the flow of the slick line of the background. This would make the website even more fun and not too boring with static pictures and text. I find that they have a good balance throughout the website in terms of colours, use of space and text.