New Beginnings

It’s been long overdue, but we’re happy to announce our new Website. It has been a very long, very complex project for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we are our own worst critics and this draws out any internal project a creative studio undertakes. Perhaps the greatest struggles were with strategic messaging and development technologies. As it turns out, there are A LOT of ways to describe the process of designing Websites and we wanted to make sure we were speaking the right language. Similarly, there are far too many ways to build a CMS powered Website and so we took some time to do our homework.

To put some perspective on this, we’ve been working on the site in one form or another for over eight months! If we’d billed ourselves for the work the site would have cost us nearly $50,000 in time and materials. That’s a lot of time and energy to dedicate to presenting yourself, but it’s something we felt we had to take our time with and do right.

Since the site was a rather complex build, we thought we’d share some of the gory details with you:

The site was designed using Photoshop for layout comps and Google Docs for content development. The iconography on our Services and Process pages was created with Maya.

We’ve used Lucida Grande as the typeface for most of the site, with some spare usage of Helvetica in places like the site’s navigation. We chose to use Lucida Grande instead of some more common Web typefaces because it has a humanistic quality that resembles our official brand typeface, FF Scala Sans – which isn’t a standard Web typeface.

The site is built on WordPress (v 2.6) and makes extensive use of the Flutter plug-in for custom fields. This enables us to manage the entire site’s content via the WordPress Admin tool. We’re also using Cforms to power our contact form, the Dagon Design Site Map Generator for our site-map, and WP Super Cache in a some-what ill-fated attempt to make WordPress run acceptably fast.

Finally, a big thank you goes out to Mike, Bill and Tommy from Foundry Interactive for their counsel and guidance on SEO with the new site.

Peter Kappus, Parker Ault, Jay “Highway” Dokken, and Stephanie Hansen were all instrumental in the site’s creation, though the entire team really put forth a massive amount of energy to get our site up. Of course, we’re always looking for feedback and suggestions so please feel free to drop us a line or just leave a comment below.

Thanks for your time -

Design Commission