Off & Running

Four months after opening for business, Artletic is running at a sprinter's pace. Existing Clients have continued to be a pleasure to work with and we've had the opportunity to connect with some great new organizations to collaborate on new projects. It seems that even as our national economy is facing a questionable next few months, companies are continuing to see the value in results driven design and thinking.

Communication Fitness in the Wild

Taking the Communication Fitness Through Design concept to heart, I've been on the lookout for good examples. Keeping in mind that the Artletic definition can be summarized as follows:

Hard working design solutions that communicate ideas in a visually appealing manner.

I found an example that I'm sure everyone is familiar with. Craigslist by itself is an amazing tool. It comes close to the first half of the definition (hard working design solution) with its scalability (567 cities in over 50 countries worldwide) and millions of active users. Not to mention the fact that I recently sold a car in less than two hours (from listing to cash-in-hand). Too easy!

It's definitely hard working. But the design and aesthetics of the site are another story. It serves its purpose, which you could say is successful in it's own right, but could be more user friendly and functional. And low and behold, a few designers took it upon themselves to examine what Craigslist could look like . The listings page mock-up is where the redesign really shines. Easily re-organized into the segments you only care about, the individual classified ads have good hierarchy for easy scanning.

This is a great example of taking a very good concept (beloved by people all around the world) and applying solid design principles to make it look and function even better.

Recently Finished

Artletic has been busy these past few months. In addition to developing new Client relationships, some hard working design has been completed. Here's a sampling of what was just finished:

• Website for a consultant to non-profit organizations. Mary needed a tool that would act as a sales brochure and initial point of contact for prospects. She also wanted to provide articles related to running a non-profit organization, so we set up a blog type feature. And finally, she informed me that she wanted it to be "the most beautiful site ever". Not sure who's grading, but she loves it. AyudaConsulting.com
  
• Logo and Poster concepts for Fresh Tracks Music Festival. The innagural festival for this indie music fun-fest is scheduled for December 2008 in Breckenridge, Colorado. We teamed up with our good friends at Limber Creative on this project - and are putting the finishing touches on a new website for the event. Stay tuned (<– music pun) for further details.
• A portfolio website for a photographer friend that enables her to update the various portfolio sections via Flickr and upcoming show details via a simple content management system. EY-Photography.com
• Logo for a property management company.

As always, you can see additional samples on the Artletic Work page.

In the Works / Upcoming

Some of the active and/or upcoming projects we're excited about include:

• Website and Email Marketing Campaign for a new western Mediterranean restaurant and bar currently in development in The Woodlands, TX (north of Houston). The site and email campaign will be a major part of the marketing system for the restaurant - showing the monthly events, articles by both the chef and sommelier (wine buyer), and gift card sales. Being an upscale restaurant, the website will need to have a sense of sophistication, smart use of technology, and features to cater to a distinguished audience. Needless to say, we're excited to be involved with this project.
• Trade Show Booth and Sales Collateral for a telecommunications partner, Allied Communications. Allied provides tremendous invidualized service to customers, but needed a way to easily explain what they do. We're working together to craft a meaningful message and make communication easy with their potential customers.
• Logo and identity system for a commercial developer, Clover Road Properties. They have a community focus, but need to present themselves as highly qualified and professional company when dealing with large health care organizations. We're developing an approachable logo that has classic elements to bridge the two concepts.
• Logo, Website, and iPhone Web Application design and front-end development for a Denver company. The iPhone portion of the project is extremely fun to work on. Much like a website, we needed to think about how a user will interact with the elements on the page. But unlike a website, the screen can rotate on the iPhone (or iPod Touch), which brought new challenges and opportunities. I can't say much about this project, but I can't wait for it to go public and start gathering user feedback. Stay tuned for more info.

Let Others Play Too

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