We’ve been hard at work, but how are you supposed to know that if we don’t tell you? There are a couple of projects—funny ones—we’ve been meaning to tell you about for a while now. Today feels like the right day.
We’ve been hard at work, but how are you supposed to know that if we don’t tell you? There are a couple of projects—funny ones—we’ve been meaning to tell you about for a while now. Today feels like the right day.
A requirement for getting into a VW bus and having your picture taken is that a rad logo must be on it. Everyone knows that. So when our friend John brought his literal bus into our figurative shop, can you guess what we did? If you guessed “slapped a rad logo on it” then you friend, are the big winner.
Deborah Lewis is the Mobile Director at Overstock.com, one of the nation’s leading online retailers. We’ve worked extremely closely with Deborah on Overstock.com’s mobile website and their iPhone, iPad, and Android applications. If anyone can attest to our capabilities when it comes to mobile, it’s her. Here’s what she had to say:
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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:
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.
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.
Scotwood Industries is the largest supplier of ice-melt in the nation. If you live in a part of the country where snow and ice regularly assault your winter months, you’ve almost certainly used their products.
Branding and design aren’t topics normally discussed by media outlets like CNN and BBC. But when Gap rolled out a new logo, found out that everyone hated it, and took it back, that’s exactly what happened. READ MORE →
We posted an article a few weeks ago that was called, “Effective or pretty?” The point of it was to question whether designers had become so focused on being fancy strategic experts that we’ve lost sight of the fact that sometimes it works to just make something look pretty. We concluded, of course, that you simply have to be focused on both aspects of great design – if something is pretty but not effective, it will fail. If something is founded in sound strategy, but doesn’t look good, it will fail.
Since the last article reminded us of the value of aesthetics, we thought we’d share a great article that reminds us of why we can’t forget strategy. Read it here.
To conclude, as a designer and when designing certain websites, your goal cannot just be to make a website aesthetically pleasing, but also to make the functions of your website easier to work with, and to integrate them together to appear as a whole system rather than appear as multiple pieces that do not connect.
With that in mind, we are not saying to eliminate the aesthetics point of design, but rather to keep an even balance of thinking about both. As with design, focusing fully on aesthetics can result with poor user interface results and vice versa.
One of our favorite non-creative related activities is running. At some point or another, all of us have been bitten by the running bug – the undeniable call to take to the pavement and push yourself to the limit. The experience of traveling miles and miles under your own power, listening to nothing but the sound of your thoughts and your feet on the road is all very romantic, actually. Until, that is, you wake up the next morning and realize that your body isn’t what it used to be and you’re in quite a lot of pain. For that reason, when we were contacted by Dr. Jesse Walden of Quest Chiropractic Center to design and develop a new website for his practice, we felt that the road to understanding his target audience wouldn’t be a long one.
Can you guess the purpose of today’s post? Yes! We’re here to announce the launch of the new Quest Chiropractic Center website, lovingly created by Johnny Lightning Strikes Again.
