That Farm Fresh Ride – 1280 x 1024

So to hopefully facilitate that move, I’ve moved us onto the Disqus commenting system. I know for me personally…I just hate to have to register another account for anything. I think the OpenID movement is a great thing & so we’ll be offering that up to our blog commenters. If you wanna comment using your Facebook, Twitter, Google or OpenID accounts you are now free to do so.

Sidebar for the nerds here: Gravatars fully supported and Disqus profiles for registered Disqus users are supported as well

Now all I need is someone to converse with…probably should say something interesting first right?

The first one you’re probably gonna notice right off the bat is the client section drop down at the top of all the pages. Well because we love our clients so much, we offer them an array of tools that we think will make our projects work as smoothly as possible. For prospective clients or existing ones who may have never used these tools let me take a moment to explain what each one is.

 
• Email Campaigns – This will take you to our email campaign service where you can manage your mailing lists & subscribers. This is great for monthly newsletters. If you’re interested in using this service just let us know and we’ll theme out your email to match your site, show you how the service works & put your organization on it’s way to reaching the masses.
• Invoicing – This is our Freshbooks invoicing service. Here you get your own personal space to receive, review, & pay invoices. Your entire payment history is here as well just in case you need an older invoice. Online payments are processed here as well but you may request “snail mail” payments (we’ll send you a printed statement & a return envelope).
• Photo Proofing – Ok the features here are too many to list but I’ll hit the high points. When you do a shoot with DS Squared Photography, your entire shoot is managed here. Once your shoot is finished & we do all the post processing your proofs will be uploaded here. We’ll send you a unique access code that you can use to view your photos & share your gallery with family & friends. Prints & packages for all of our sizes and mounting options are available to registered customers. Pick your prints/packages, fill your cart & pay us online. We’ve worked hard to make our photography workflow from beginning to end as simple as possible.
• Project Management – This is for our corporate customers. When working on larger scale projects (e.g. websites & branding) we set up a workspace for that individual project where we can communicate with your team & your team with us. We layout specific project milestones, open discussions & post project files all to this central area.
• Request a quote – This is simply a form for prospective & returning customers that allows us to get some details on any projects you’d like to work with us on.

Another new feature just freshly added to the site is an archive of all our blog posts. You can find this page under the blog link in the main menu. Posts are listed in a reverse chronological order and separated by month.

Also when browsing through the blog you will see a flyout panel displaying the next post in the category so you can jump to the next article with out ever having to go back through the menus. Plus it just kinda looks cool.

We’ve got some other things in the works for client testimonials & social streams for this site & as always we’ll be working behind the scenes to make our site better for you.

The Design Brief

It’s a fund raiser for the Okefenokee Heritage Center. We will be selling booth space to those who would like to come and sell their wares – which will include art, antiques, crafts and collectibles. I named it Christmas In the ‘Cross (waycross) because we hope to establish this for every year at the first weekend in December and hopefully some of the crafters will have Christmas type crafts. I wanted to incorporate the maltese cross because supposedly Waycross’ downtown was layed out in a malteste cross pattern – the same one used for the Plant Railroad System. I don’t want the cross to be really obvious but would like a christmas feel to it. We will use this logo on our flyers and advertisement and who knows.. maybe even some t-shirts So there you go.

So there’s the challenge. Forty-eighty hours to make a logo that invokes the holiday spirit and the heritage of Waycross, GA.

I was really having a creative roadblock for essentially the first 24 hrs. & an off-topic conversation with my lovely wife was really what sparked an idea (so she gets some credit here). Somehow the stars just aligned and I think what resulted is one of our most simple, yet iconic logos to date. Check it out below.

So all that to set the stage for the following 2 part blog series on our experiences as designers within the “cookie jar” design process. In part one, Matt will discuss his frustrations with the web development process…the miscommunications, the scope creep, the endless revisions, etc.  Also, you’ll hear about the changes we’ve made to our web development workflows to avoid any of these problems reoccurring in the future.

In part 2, I’ll discuss how something as important as a corporate identity can be so so poorly handled. I’ll discuss how an original idea became warped into an attempt at a carbon copy clone of a national competitor in the cable industry. Plus, I’ll cover why I now know the importance behind a corporate identity guide when it comes to the logo development process.

We made a lot of mistakes during this project but in that same vein we learned a lot from all of them. So with this series we’re hoping to share what we learned and hopefully help some fellow creatives avoid the same mistakes we made.