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.

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

The new LCMS New Jersey District website

We recently launched a redesign and re-implementation of the website for the New Jersey District of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS).  They had a district convention coming up in June and they wanted to overhaul their site in preparation for that event.  The project spec had three main objectives:

• A visual redesign with a more professional look
• An easy-to-use content management system to allow the district office staff to be able to easily add and update the site content
• The ability for the district staff to continue using their existing web-based tools on the new website: Picasa photo galleries, Google calendars, Constant Contact e-newsletters, email, etc.

The original LCMS New Jersey District website

We broke the project down into four phases:

• Site re-organization and information architecture planning: The original website, after years of organic growth, had inconsistent organization of its content.  Working with the district, we planned out a new top-to-bottom re-organization of all the site pages, divided by category.  For instance, “Missions,” “Stewardship,” “LWML,” and “Conferences & Conventions” were all moved into sub-pages of “Ministries.” We also planned out the major content and interface elements of each page type: Homepage, Menu pages, Body pages, Blog pages, etc.
• Graphic design, layout, and look-and-feel: We produced several proposed mockups of a redesigned homepage layout and discussed them with the client.  Once we had the homepage visual design finalized, we used it as a basis to design the other site pages.
• Building XHTML/CSS Templates: With the look-and-feel for all the site pages planned out, we built XHTML/CSS templates for each of the major page types, ready to be implemented into a content management system.
• Implement the site on a suitable content management system: We researched various content management systems that would be powerful enough to meet the needs of the client, but still simple enough for them to be able to easily pick up and use.  In addition, due to budgetary considerations, we also wanted to use an open source solution.  We ended up selecting SilverStripe, an open-source, PHP/MySQL-based system. Daniel Bergquist handled the development and implementation of the site, converting our XHTML files into SilverStripe templates, and building in all the functionality that the site needed.  We wrote additional CSS as needed to cover all content contingencies, and corresponded with the client during the process.

The design for the site's menu pages

The design for the site's body pages

The new site launched on June 3, 2009, just in time for the district convention.  It was the biggest site that we’ve worked on yet, both in size and functionality.  It included such things as embedded Picasa photo slideshows, an embedded calendar, a dynamically updated homepage news feed, and multiple blogs with RSS feeds.  You can see the finished website here:

www.njdistrict.org