Balaam’s Donkey is a Denver-based classic rock band, and they commissioned us to produce a logo for their band.  The logo imagery was to be, not surprisingly, a donkey.  In keeping with the light-hearted, cheeky personality of the band, we decided to create a logo with a bright, cartoon-like feel to it.  We started out by making several pencil sketches of the donkey until we had a sketch that we were satisfied with.

Our finalized donkey sketch

After we had a finalized sketch, we scanned it into the computer and traced it out in Adobe Illustrator.  First we drew it out as a series of fixed-stroke-width lines.  Then we converted the stroked lines to solid shapes so that we could refine the line thickness.  That way we could transform the chunky, single-thickness line drawing into something a bit more elegant, as you can see in the below example for the lines of the donkey ears:

The donkey ears before and after we manually adjusted the line thickness

We worked on the Illustrator drawing like this until we produced the final black and white version of the logo, seen below.

The finished logo in black and white

After that we started adding in color and shading…

Added the background…

And finally added a subtle drop shadow between the donkey and the background to give the illustration some dimension.

After this was finished, it was time to choose an appropriate typeface to match the illustration.  In logo work, when the lettering is such a prominent part of the visual design — and indeed sometimes the only component of the visual design — finding an appropriate typeface is of utmost importance.  We needed a typeface that was both solid and easy to read, but still with a bit of a whimsical flavor to it.  It took a lot of experimentation to find an appropriate typeface, and we looked at many different typefaces side by side.

Some of typeface finalists that we considered

Finally, after choosing an appropriate typeface, we had our finalized logo.

Balaam’s Donkey was very pleased with their new logo and will be using it on all their official band materials from here on out.  We enjoyed working with them and wish them the best of success in their musical endeavors.  Whenever Balaam’s Donkey needs additional graphic design and web design work in the future, we at Chris Strom, LLC will be happy to work with them again.

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37signals recently wrote a new blog entry talking about their new web design and development directory Haystack, with screenshots of some various featured companies from the directory.  The first company pictured in the blog is none other than us.  We feel honored to have our company spotlighted so prominently in such an internationally influential blog.

Come check it out here.

As we’ve been building websites here at Chris Strom, LLC, we’ve been building up a small collection of handy cut-and-paste pre-made HTML snippets.  After awhile, we figured they weren’t doing much good just sitting on their hard drive between projects, so we’ve built a site to put them onto the web and share them with the world: HTML-Assets.com

We’ve got pre-made code for various HTML dropdown menus like selecting one’s age, selecting US states, selecting countries, selecting time zones, and so on — I mean, who really wants to type out all 200+ countries of the world by hand into an HTML select box?  We’ve also got a selection of HTML Lorem Ipsum text pre-cut into various paragraph and list formats, pre-made HTML markup for CSS dropdown menus, and Javascript code snippets.

We also have a pre-built HTML “skeleton page” that we use as the starting point for every web page we build.  It comes with a 960 pixel fixed-width canvas that aut0-centers in the web browser and automatically stretches vertically to fill the browser screen regardless of how much content it is filled with.  It also comes with a pre-made <ul> footer menu that auto-sticks to the bottom of the browser screen.

We’ll continue to add to this site over time, so be sure to visit every now and then to see what’s new.  Also, if you’ve got ideas on additional time-saving code snippets to add, leave us a comment below or drop us a line and let us know!

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A few months ago I posted some of my photography from Malaysia. Now I have new photography from my time in Hong Kong posted online.  Come check it out here. Enjoy!

Photography by Chris Strom: Hong Kong

Our finished Cavendish Scott website redesign

Cavendish Scott is a Denver-based company that specializes in ISO management system consulting, auditing and training.  They have a large client base and offer a wide range of business services, and needed a correspondingly large website overhaul to match the scope of their business activities.  Their previous website had become very dated both visually and technologically, and years of hodgepodge maintenance by many different people had left it in need of a comprehensive restart.  When we took on this project, the first thing we did was plan out an overhaul of the site’s information architecture, breaking it down into four categories:

• Our Services
• Our Company
• About ISO
• Contact Us

As we were planning the information architecture, we noticed that most of the current site’s content focused mostly on talking about the company itself, with little written about how they could help the customer.  So we made sure to boost the amount of content in the Our Services section as well, to increase the focus on serving the customers’ needs.  The “Our Services” section was further divided down into three separate categories, based on the company’s three main areas of business: ISO consulting, ISO auditing and ISO Training.

After we had the site’s new information architecture planned out, our redesign process followed our standard web design workflow: Visual design, followed by XHTML/CSS template construction, followed by development and implementation.  We focused heavily on the homepage during the visual design page.  It would be fairly content-heavy: there would be a company introduction, a recent news section, a newsletter signup form, a Featured Services area, and more.  We worked heavily on taking this information and presenting it in a visually effective manner, with a clear hierarchy of information — something that would draw the site visitors in to learn more, rather than overwhelming them and turning them away.  We made an eye-catching introductory paragraph and accompanying graphic at the top of the page, along with a prominent portion of screen real estate dedicated to Cavendish Scott’s current featured services.  We focused heavily on featuring strong calls to action — a large percentage of the page’s prime real estate is dedicated to quick-links to featured areas of the site.

Strong calls to action on the site's homepage

Another key consideration during the visual development phase was the appropriate use of color: we focused on achieving the right balance between using enough color to balance out the site’s text-heavy content, without making it look excessively bright and loud — this was a professional business-to-business site, not the Cartoon Network.

Effective use of color livens up the text-heavy content

The site’s development and implementation was similarly involved, with the site needing a good amount of custom functionality.  The homepage’s newsletter signup form was programmed to plug directly into the client’s iContact.com newsletter software API, with built-in form validation and confirmation emails to the client.  The website’s News section is powered by a WordPress engine, with a custom homepage script to pull and display headlines from the several most recent postings.  In addition, we built custom functionality into the training schedule page, so that users could quick-link from every class listed on the training schedule right to either its accompanying class registration form or to an appropriately auto-completed contact form to request more information.  On the training registration form, we used AJAX functionality in order to dynamically update the available course dates as users changed between the different training courses offered.

Quick-links to the appropriate auto-completed signup and contact forms

AJAX functionality powers dynamically updated input fields

The finished project was a resounding success and a huge upgrade to the company’s website presence.  We were pleased to be able to work with Cavendish Scott on such a seminal project for their company, and look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.

You can see the finished site here:

www.CavendishScott.com

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