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Welcome to Kansas City, Snow & Company

Posted in News on by JLSA

Snow & Company Branding & Digital Partner - Johnny Lightning Strikes Again
Dear Snow & Company,

One year ago we met and you told us about your restaurant/bar concept. You didn’t have a location or a brand (that’s where we were to come in), but you were passionate about starting something great…something that would last. A few weeks ago, you opened your doors and served your first frozen cocktail. Congratulations, and welcome to Kansas City.

Your friends,
Johnny Lightning Strikes Again

P.S. For those of you who are interested, we’ll post something about the work we’ve been doing with Snow & Company before too long. In the meantime, you can read an article about them here. Of course, if you’d like to check out Snow & Company in person, you can get the lowdown at snowandcompany.com.

We’d like to take a moment to congratulate our clients The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange and Manifesto for cleaning house in The Pitch’s Best of Kansas City awards. They were awarded Best Restaurant, Best New Restaurant, Best Place for a Business Lunch, and Best Cocktail Menu. They also placed high in Best Chef (Howard Hanna), Best Bartender (Jenn Tosatto), Best Martini, and Best New Bar or Club.

Impressive, right? To read about some of the work we’ve done with The Rieger, click here.

User Interface Design

Posted in Strategy on by James Penman

User Interface Design - Information Architecture Diagram - Johnny Lightning Strikes

What is user interface design?

In the past 30 years, the ways in which we interact with content have changed significantly. No longer do we simply pick up a piece of paper and read from left to right — we click, we surf, we roll over, and we search. As these systems have become more complicated it has become increasingly important to make them seem easy. This is the purpose of user interface design.

User interface design, or user experience design, is the process of designing how a user interacts with a given system, whether that system be a website, an application, or a piece of software. It has a hand in all aspects of interaction — how a user perceives a system, how they learn it, and how they use it. While user interface design is primarily associated with digital products, the philosophy behind the field is much older than websites and software. As soon as humans started building machines that required people to operate, someone had to think about how this operation could be carried out as smoothly as possible.

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A new website. A new agency.

Welcome to JLSA.com, the new online home of Johnny Lightning Strikes Again. Not only did we pack up our brand and move from our previous address (strikesagain.net), we built a brand new house once we got here. We couldn’t be more proud to unveil it.

Johnny Lightning Strikes Again was founded in 2009, and while it may seem like two years is an awfully short amount of time to be in business before overhauling your website, the past two years have been full of change. We’ve grown. We’ve matured. We’ve learned what kind of agency we are and what kind of agency our clients need us to be. Therefore, this is not just a new website. It’s a new chapter in the life of our agency; the culmination of two years of hard work, creativity, mistakes, and success.

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Client review from Team Cocktail

Posted in News on by JLSA

Lyndsey Higgins, Co-Founder of Team Cocktail, was nice enough to write a little bit about their experience working with us on their branding, clothing, and web design project:

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Happy Anniversary!

Posted in News on by JLSA

In April, we celebrated our birthday; Johnny Lightning Strikes Again is two years old.

While we’ve been working in the branding, design, and marketing industry for much longer, we can honestly say that the past two years have been the most fun, most productive, and most creative of our lives. We’d like to thank everyone that has been involved in helping us reach this milestone – your advice and support have been invaluable. We’d especially like to thank our clients, both for trusting us with your brands and allowing us to be partners in your businesses. We’re honored.

Here’s to many years to come!

Johnny Lightning Strikes Again - Lightning Bolt Logo

We are proud to announce that, for the second year in a row, Johnny Lightning Strikes Again has been nominated for The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s “Mr. K Award.”  The Mr. K Award, named after famed Kansas City entrepreneur Ewing Kauffman, is given to The Chamber’s Small Business of the Year and is based on business growth, exemplary employee relations, and a strong record of service to the community.

We’d like to thank The Chamber and say that it has been a privilege serving businesses in the Kansas City area for your branding, web design, graphic design, and marketing needs!

The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Logo

Clients who understand branding

Posted in News on by JLSA

Branding is a word that is used a lot – not just in our industry, but in the business world as a whole. But what is branding? It’s a slightly difficult question, because branding is often defined not by what it is, but by the most common applications of it. Branding is when you design a logo. Branding is when you design a website with a look-and-feel specific to that company. Branding is when you mark an animal with a branding iron. While all of these statements are true, none of them can really serve as a proper definition of branding.

Branding is the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design. It is a communication tool, used to capture the message of a company and deliver it through visuals. It is not something that a company does once and then checks off their list; it is an on-going process that enables businesses to increase their visibility and achieve their goals.

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Al Capone did what here?

Posted in News on by JLSA

Kansas City Web Design for The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange - Johnny Lightning Strikes Again

If you are from our hometown of Kansas City, MO and keep up with what’s happening in local fine dining, you’ve almost certainly heard about the recent opening of The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange. If not, The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange is a phenomenal new restaurant in the Crossroads Art District with a very rich history (guys – if you visit, be sure to use the restroom and see the plaque describing what Al Capone has done in there). What does this have to do with branding, design, or marketing?  Well, we had the privilege of producing the website for The Rieger, which you can check out here: http://theriegerkc.com/. While you’re there, be sure to look for the key and unlock some information about one of The Rieger’s (and Kansas City’s) best little secrets.

Thank you to Ryan Maybee and Howard Hanna for bringing this restaurant to life and allowing us to be a part of it. We’re confident that you’ll be a Kansas City landmark for a long time to come!

Are you having fun?

Posted in News on by JLSA

Team Cocktail Website Design - Clothing Branding Detail - Johny Lightning Strikes Again

UPDATE: The business for Team Cocktail kept growing, so they came to us for a website design reboot! Check out our latest work for them in our Team Cocktail case study and portfolio.

When a company engages us to solve a problem facing their business, one of the questions we have to answer is, “Does this company LOOK like who they are and what they’re doing?” Team Cocktail, a clothing and accessory company, asks a similar question to people who are out to have fun: “Do you LOOK like it?” If not, they offer a full line of products, designed by Johnny Lightning Strikes Again, for sale on their e-commerce website, also designed and developed by Johnny Lightning Strikes Again.

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