Catch me if you can.

It's not often that you come across sites which are just about exemplary so may I present www.lts-architects.co.uk. It is the site of London architectural practice Loates Taylor Shannon and it was designed by architecture student Matthew Jones who will start his Part 3 this September. I mention this because I regularly advise architects not to design their own sites on the grounds that although they are of course all uomo universali, graphic and web design are strictly post-Renaissance activities not normally well covered in an architectural education. Talent will out, however, and although you may cavil that the LTS site's visual design is conventional architectural white text on grey and elegantly sparse you can only marvel at its speed. No silly little clocks or bars telling you how long you are going to have to wait for the Great Work to emerge on to the screen. Zappp there the next image is. And the next. I was so impressed that I rang up Jones to ask him to at least give a hint of how he did it. As you might expect it was a matter of grinding file sizes back to their minimum viewable size, no tricks and lots of thinking around the concept of fast and how people would use the site. This attention to user-friendly detail extends to the grey-on-white project sheets for each project--which surfers will find much less expensive and faster to print out than grey. Just great.

Soaring on electronic wings, Sutherland Lyall casts an eagle eye around for prey.