Our Design

Intuitive, compelling, conversion-focused design doesn’t just magically happen. Our content architects use insights uncovered by our digital marketing strategy to refine sitemaps and build an intuitive user experience. From there, our designers work to craft an ideal, content-driven experience for your audience. Rather than forcing the design to constrain the content, we allow the content to inform our designs. As a result, our work is focused on engaging your target audience and driving conversions.

Web Design

Anybody can set up a website—but we build strategic, engaging websites that instantly reinforce credibility, communicate established messaging to intended audiences, and ultimately converts users into customers.

Picture this…

You’re famished, so you pull into a restaurant you’ve never been in. You open the door and immediately lose your appetite. There’s grease on every surface and a battalion of flies is enjoying a half eaten French dip at an abandoned booth. You glance at the counter; the hostess doesn’t lift her eyes from her phone as cigarette smoke curls around her fingers. You turn around and leave.

Even though nobody smokes in diners anymore, you get the analogy—and this scenario occurs online continually. If visitors to your website are turned off aesthetically, you don’t stand a chance—no matter what you’re offering or how quickly you come up in Google.

We build visually compelling websites that instantly reinforce credibility and that drive conversions: warm and welcoming gourmet restaurants, if you will, that turn wary visitors into raving evangelists.

How? Best practice, on-brand design that is informed by strategy, research, collaboration, and fourteen years of experience—and also a ton of talent.

Content-driven design

King of Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, tweeted once,

“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

The godfather of the web is dead on. Decorations don’t drive home messages. Content does. Reducing text-based content to a visual design element (the shape of the text) can result in bloated and unrealistic client expectations once real data replaces the dummy content. We allow our design decisions to be dictated by the on-page content and messaging, and often our designers use the actual content to inspire interesting elements that might not have been conceived without it.

The website is only the beginning

Once initial designs are complete, ongoing partnership clients receive routine design audits in which a variety of testing tools (e.g., heat mapping, A/B testing) are used to subtlety adjust layouts, calls to action, and visual hierarchy. This non-stop improvement creates websites that not only keep looking like four-star restaurants but also have the functionality and advanced programming to deliver leads, clients, and revenue.

Responsive Design

Responsive web design allows us to build sites that provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices—whether you’re on a smartphone or a 27” monitor. It allows easy reading and navigation without the drudgery of resizing, panning, and scrolling or the time and expense of building customized mobile apps for the major platforms.

A flexible foundation

Over a third of your customers primarily go online using their smartphones—in fact, mobile and tablet browsing is expected to eclipse desktop-based access within three to five years. This very page you’re on right now, believe it or not, receives 31 percent of its traffic from smartphones and tablets.

Was your website built with the technology and the design foresight to not only automatically scale content for an extremely wide range of screen sizes but also to dynamically prioritize content and adapt on-page elements according to the size of the device viewing the website?

Why we choose responsive

It’s a fact: 86 percent of smartphone and tablet owners have used their devices to look up information about a business in the past thirty days. How do you effectively reach your audience and ensure its experience with your website is positive no matter the platform or screen size? We’ve stopped trying to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices that might possibly access your website. Instead, we build websites that adapt and respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation.

Responsive design gives us the freedom to build a site that can dynamically change to fit each user and platform. A media query allows us to target not only certain device classes but also to actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device rendering our work. We then prioritize content and make strategic choices as elements shift and reposition themselves—for example, highlighting the contact info and social media elements when a user is browsing on a smartphone or adjusting the text size and readability when a user is on a tablet device.

Mobile-first

During a typical responsive design project, designers begin with the desktop design and work to prioritize and scale content for numerous breakpoints dictated by the thousands of different devices and screen sizes. Mobile-first design, however, reverses this process. So rather than porting the desktop version, the content is optimized for the smallest screens first (mobile), and as the need arises, the site can gradually be improved for larger platforms with fewer constraints. Think “progressive enhancement” rather than “graceful degradation.”

An Alternative to Responsive

Occasionally, a client’s needs extend past scaling a site down for mobile use and requires a dedicated application. The end goals for designing apps, whether they’re used by customers or internally, differ greatly from website priorities. Applications are often used daily and require robust, intuitive functionality with a focus on ease of use rather than on funneling users to conversion points.

App Developement & Design

App Development & Design

Native, web, or hybrid—we design and build customized, polished web applications for startups and enterprise clients. Whether the goal is selling products, collaboration, spreading news, or pushing the app as a product itself, every app undergoes the same extensive strategy and research as web projects.

Websites vs. Web Apps

The end goals for designing web apps, whether they’re used by customers or internally, differ greatly from our website priorities. To oversimplify it, websites are for consumption, whereas apps are for interaction. Web apps see frequent use, require robust, intuitive functionality, and typically have only a single, specific focus. Websites, however, may only be visited once and have a very limited opportunity to make an impression. More often than not, websites are built to allow users to access information and to be funneled into conversion points, whereas web apps are used as a tool to specific tasks.

It’s all about the User Interface

In app design, everything depends on the user interface. We design versatile, intuitive user interfaces that focus solely on the end user’s emotional connection to the application. All too often, web appsand software present the users with all the tools that will ever be needed—all simultaneously through dense menus, ribbons, drop-downs, and so on. Think of it like comparing Microsoft Word to Photoshop. Open Word and you’ll see every tool, at your disposal, ready to use. However, open Photoshop (or any of Adobes CS Suite apps in fact) and you’re presented with only relevant information, ordered for your particular task.

Brand Identity

Consistency is the key to establishing brand identity and to turning your company’s purpose and mission into a visual story. From brand guidelines to logo design, letterheads and everything in between, we develop strong visual identities that proliferate across mediums.

We don’t just design pretty logos

The most powerful visual identities are memory hooks—consistent, elegant yet simple marks that instantly relate a company’s core values, credibility, and personality. We get to know your business, its personality, and what it truly values. We use this information to inspire designs that capture the essence of your company and convey an effective and authentic feeling.

We’re not talking about just a logo here, either—but that’s certainly a good starting point. We carry visual identities through everything we produce, from site design and marketing materials to style guides, letterheads, and even business cards.