I am very excited to announce that we have won a Silver ADDY Award for our work on i3 Strategies website!

ADDY Awards are given out yearly by the Mid-Michigan Creative Alliance as a way to recognize local designers and companies teams that are fueling the creative revolution in Michigan. There are a number of award categories for print, interactive, and audio/visual media, as well as a category for student work. This was GreenLite's very first ADDY - not bad for our second year in business!

This year's event was held at the Old Town Temple Club in Lansing, which is a really cool venue where IgniteLansing 2.0 was recently held. Jeff and Steve were in attendance along with our client, Julielyn Gibbons of i3 Strategies. We would like to extend a special thanks to Julielyn for allowing us to experiment creatively with her original vision. And let's not forget Chris, our lead developer who transformed the design into a live website at http://i3strategies.com.

We hope to see you at next year's event!

Ag-Co, a company that specializes in selling horse stalls, recently launched their new and improved e-commerce site. Instead of pushing their products, Ag-Co was interested in capturing their customers' love and enjoyment of riding. To accomplish this, we used a large image to give the site a friendly, personal feel. By using browns and a touch of autumn orange, the site appears warm and inviting. We also simplified their navigation and concentrated on giving the site a clean, fresh look thereby elevating this St. John's-based company above their competition--both state- and nation-wide. Check out a before and after shot to see what a website redesign can do for your business. Which site is more likely to make customers feel confident that they are buying a high-quality product?

NuWave Technology Partners, one of Michigan’s leading IT providers, expanded their services to include the residential market with the launch of NuWave Home Services--Nuwavehome.com. NuWave was interested in continuing their branding but also wanted their new site to have a distinct feel. Steve, the designer, understood what they were looking for and nailed this design on his first attempt (not an unusual feat, but this design didn't require even a single tweak, which is why it's particularly noteworthy). His use of shadows, repeating elements, and lines adds a great deal of interest to this simple, streamlined site.

Next time you need some computer help or want DirecTV installed, be sure to call this Michigan-based business.

You know as a web designer nothing is more disheartening then working on a website that has a truly horrible logo and accompanying outdated marketing materials. Usually it’s a bad hand drawn of artwork or something that looks like it was rushed out by a highschool kid with his first PC. It’s not just that it makes designing so much more difficult to work around that sore spot but you get so frustrated because you know that small business or organization is doing some great things and their visual identity quite frankly says the opposite. Often the client is like “well we’ve had that logo for 30 years, it’s what people know us for, but we want a website that really shows us as leaders” Do you see the disconnect? They want a great website that really reflects their amazing organization but they never looked at a root problem, their brand and more specifically the anchor that is their visual identity. They almost feel personally attached to it and it’s human nature to oppose change even for the better.

Listen, it’s time to let that 70’s disco inspired abstract symbol with the courier font to go to pasture. It’s not what your company is…it may have been what your company was when everyone in your office was in leisure suits smoking cigarettes and drove without seat belts but this isn’t who you are any more nor how you want to be portrayed. Your competition is utilizing social media, is taking fresh approaches in how they market themselves and you continue to trudge along in the trenches not realizing your getting passed by everyone else. It’s time to set yourself apart and take your branding to the next level.

Your brand needs to have a strong visual identity that not only can reach out to your existing customers and potential new customers but your own employees as well. It solidifies your direction and connects the points in the intangibles ways about  describing your business, it’s energy, it’s advantages. It helps create brand loyalty among your customers. Just remember you need a great business/product or the logo is just lying. the new brand has to be truthful and open just like your business has to be.

Since I’ve been doing logo design in tangent with developing an online presence, I’ve seen clients renewed and energized about their business again. They love being involved with the creative process of creating a logo and more importantly clearly laying out what their business is about and how it should be represented. My job as a designer is just to focus that and make it easily communicated visually. I’m not saying every business needs a logo redesign but I think a lot of companies could use a brand makeover. It might not be redesigning their logo but sometimes an evaluation of a business goals and direction can unmask some unforeseen problems in their visual identity that can be tweaked. Even if its font usage, colors or simple thematics around it which can better support their logo both in their print materials and the web. In the end a company or business that is excited about what they’re doing makes the world a little better in my opinion. I’m glad I can try to help in that.

Last week Chris challenged me to try out a new web browser for a week. The browser is called Flock and it's available as a free download for Mac or PC.

Based on the popular Firefox browser, Flock takes the next step with keeping users constantly connected to their favorite social media. Whether you're into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, MySpace (for real?), or any other social networking site, Flock has a way to keep it in your face at all times. To get started you just open Flock and enter your various usernames and passwords for sites you want to stay connected to. Flock adds these to a sidebar that displays updates from all of your friends, recently added pictures and video, or even just links to news stories. You'll also get a home page with a more detailed view of all this info (see the screenshot below).

There are a couple of things I really liked about Flock: it was really easy to connect to my various networks, eveyone's updates are aggregated into the same feed, and grabbing an RSS feed or media stream from a page was simple and quick. On the other side though, all of this constantly-updating information is a huge distraction. I'd log on to check my email and spend 30 minutes on Facebook, or I'd start to check my bank account only to find 10 new stories about a soon-to-be-released video game. While I wasn't particularly productive while on Flock, I always knew what everyone else was up to.

The one thing that really bugged me was that the default search was set to Yahoo. Now, I don't want to get into a "religious" discussion here, but let's just say that I generally prefer Google 100% of the time. However, a quick search (on Google) revealed that Flock is endorsed by Yahoo.

Long story short, Flock is great if you love social media. Why don't you take the challenge: try out Flock for a week and let me know what you think!