Swamped actually. Between the demanding position as the new Interactive Creative Director at MediaCross, and my demanding friends & freelance clients, I have been working really hard on a few projects over the past two months. I’ve been working in trade on a couple of pieces in order to help out some new small businesses in this down economy, which is paying for wedding flowers, cocktails, and concerts.
This all started back in August around the time I went out to shoot Washington Avenue in my St. Louis by Type project. We landed some new business at MediaCross, and I started drawing again. Here are some of the products of the past 3 months:
I found myself frustrated in a couple instances were people would call meetings for no other reason than calling a meeting together. So, I began to doodle. This turned into a short-lived Twitter meme known as the L33t-z00, which was a tennis match of drawings between @DetailedGhost and I.
The idea was to take L33t-Speak and represent these social acronyms and nonsense words, “LOL, ROFL, Pwned and others,” by creating animal caricatures of them.
Meanwhile I was steadily working on several other real projects. The first being a recruitment micro-site that’s programmed all in Flash for the Ascension Health ministry. It’s a pretty kick-ass application. It was built to utilize some pretty hefty traffic from social networks via AddThis, Twitter & LinkedIn. Flash also allowed us to re-imagine our metrics goals, because we could pick and choose exactly what user-interactions we wanted to monitor. I’m happy to say that this site has finally launched and is going to be a huge success with support from a huge social media campaign, online banner ads, emails, job board postings, fliers, posters and brochures. Check it:
Credits:
Site Design & Intro Programming: Bobby Duebelbeis
CMS & Flash Programming: Adam Kellogg
Account Team: Jennifer Umali & Connie Risby
Copywriting: Rich Heend
Latest feedback: “It looks awesome!!!!!! I looked at it last night! Thank you for everything!”
— Jennifer Umali
During the time that the Symphony site was in production, my friend Kelly asked me to put together a website for her new floral design company. We talked about the idea a little bit, and she gave me some ideas about color’s she liked and told me the name of her company is, “The Crimson Petal.” That pretty much stuck in my mind as I created a logo for her. I was able to quickly draw a nice lotus-like icon by hand, thanks to my recent doodling practice I’d been getting in. I brought it into Illustrator and refined the shapes enough to make it replicable and passed her an email.
A big thing she asked for was “Asian-inspired,” which to me meant: “make sure you show off my flowers and not your design.” We got together and discussed business cards, which I ended up ordering for her. The great thing about Kelly is that she was really interested in what I had initially done with her logo, and trusted me to run with my creativity all the way to the finish line. I couldn’t have felt more free to create and she clearly got some really elegant cards out of it. I was able to pull off a great pearl foil on the white card front that just adds so much depth and texture. If I had it to do all over again, I might consider letterpress, but I’m really happy with the way they turned out, and Kelly is also.
The Crimson Petal website is a display of testimonials; both in the photographs of Kelly’s floral design and the words of her clients. I decided to bring her product to the forefront and created a slide show of testimonial posts. She additionally wanted to maintain a blog. This is not usually something many clients ask for, and it was refreshing to know that I was not going to have to spend a ton of time explaining the importance of fresh, relevant website content.
It’s actually a pretty simple site design. But, since it’s programmed in WordPress, Kelly gets to take advantage of all of the built-in social networking functionality of this framework. Her blog automatically notifies her Twitter followers of a new post, which she’s able to track with bit.ly link-shortening analytics. Users can comment freely on her blog posts, and Kelly can engage a captive audience at virtually every turn. I wish her all the success in the world, and can’t wait to see the floral arrangements she designs for my wedding.
http://www.thecrimsonpetal.com
Credits:
Site Design & Programming: Bobby Duebelbeis
Copywriting: Kelly Jurotich
Last, but definitely not least, the Dollar Bin website creation went underway last month. Dave DeGuire, former bar manager of Rue 13, moved his promotional efforts and DJ talent over to the Atomic Cowboy. Dave’s always done a whole lot of social networking. I remember helping him build the first Dollar Bin & Rue 13 myspace pages. Around that time I had just finished the Rue 13 site revisions, taking it into Flash & XML.
Every week at Dollar Bin, the staff walk around taking candid shots of all the party people. And every week, Dave posted those photos on MySpace for everyone to try and remember the night (especially helpful for those grossly intoxicated few).
As MySpace is quickly heading the way of the dinosaur, Dave had moved a lot of redundant photo updates to Facebook. He was literally doing twice the work he used to do; cropping, sizing, colorizing and logo-izing. I recommended that Dave get a home-base website. He was doing a ton of work between Twitter, Facebook & MySpace to bring people together, and was falling short of bringing that party together somewhere… online.
So that’s exactly what we did. I had a talk with Dave about desired functionality, and then took the reigns. Photos took center stage. I incorporated an opening slide show of featured images, and a gallery page to house the thousands of Dollar Bin photos. Next came social media integration. I added links to the Dollar Bin Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages. Then I made sure that all new posts to the site would automatically notify the Dollar Bin Twitter followers.
I also included a Tweet-up on the site for people that use the #dollarbinstl hashtag. Now DeadAsDisco, the Dollar Bin DJ is able to take requests via Twitter. And Dave is able to post notices about last-minute drink specials right on the front of the site from his iPhone. And everyone else that wants to just shout-out can leave their mark on the site.
This site is definitely a winner: http://www.dollar-bin.com
Credits:
Site Design & Programming: Bobby Duebelbeis
Logo Design: Jason Kanzler
And if all of this weren’t enough, I’m writing this blog at 7:45AM after being up all night launching website(s).