Apt Design » Portfolio

Outcast Website

Apt Design — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 23:59:47 +0000

Outcast had a good website, but they were looking for a sleek, sexy redesign that would better appeal to it’s young, on-the-go target market. The new site also needed to incorporate it’s two different products – ad space at Fitness clubs and ad space at Fuel pumps. Tribe brought me in as a lead designer on this project to help provide this cool new look.

Colors to Differentiate

We decided early on on a dark color scheme that would allow the bright colors of Outcast’s branding to really pop off of the screen. We then split the content of the site into 3 sections and differentiated them by color: orange for Outcast, green for Fitness, blue for Fuel. This helped users understand the different parts of the company and know which content they were viewing at all times.

Graphics to Explain

I helped created custom infographics for the landing pages of the different parts of the site. These infographics give a quick overview as to the powerful demographics Outcast brings to the table.

A Gorgeous Finale

Careful attention was paid to the images on the site. As the design utilizes big background images to evoke powerful feelings of strength, youth and mobility we scoured image banks and went through thousands of images to make sure we got photos that spoke directly to the user.

Casey did a great job coding the entire site, providing subtle animations, AJAX loading of blog items, and in general making the site perform as well as we had all hoped. In the end the client was enthused about the redesign that reflected their core audience like a mirror.

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Indiewire Website Design

Apt Design — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:11:23 +0000

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If you’re looking for the latest news and reviews on all things in the movie industry, IndieWire is one of the heavy-hitters on the web. They provide insight and coverage on everything coming out of Hollywood. They just needed a good website to put it all on. I worked with my friends at Tribe again to design a new IndieWire.com from the ground up.

Depth, depth, depth

The content you can drill down through on this site is just awesome. Not only did we have to design for all of it, we had to make sure visitors wouldn’t get confused while they were moving from story to gallery to review. We spend hours wireframing the best way to tell each section’s story.

Powerful Widgets

On some websites the sidebar widgets are an afterthought, thrown in to take up space. Not so on IndieWire. Each widget throughout the site offers fresh content, relevant links, and standalone info about current movies. We wanted to make sure the user understood this too. Careful consideration was given to make each widget appealing, easy to understand, and part of an integrated whole while it offered it’s own unique message.

A Vast Network

But IndiWire.com isn’t the only part of this project. The site features a huge network of other blogs and sites that feed into IndieWire. One of the problems we solved was unifying all these sites into a more cohesive network. We created a number of corresponding design template so that each network could choose a similar look, while getting options for making their own site unique.

Nominated for a Webby

The new design didn’t go unnoticed. In 2012 IndieWire was nominated for a Webby Award (the Oscars of the web). Go check out in the Media: Movie and Film category!

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Icicle Creek Posters

Apt Design — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 01:21:58 +0000

The Beginning

I began working with Icicle Creek Center for the Arts in the summer of 2011. At the the company was undergoing major transformation – changing their services, their focus, and even their name. They also brought on a new marketing director to help give Icicle Creek a new image. The first time Lilia and I met we knew we had a big task in front of us, along with the potential to do something really great!

One of the first things we had to do was create diversity among unity. Icicle Creek had multiple branches doing many different things in the arts world. We had to give each of these branches their own flavor while keeping enough consistency throughout to help people recognize they belonged to a whole.

Our latest posters and designs have captured the hearts and attention of the community. We increasingly receive requests from people wondering how they can get one of these posters!

The Posters

Event posters are some of the most noticed marketing pieces Icicle Creek uses in the community. Lilia and I worked together to create a flexible template for the events showcased in the company’s Performance Series. Each poster uses the backdrop of the mountainous environment surrounding the campus to center the place. The posters showcase the performer’s, each in their own mood, colors and style. Overall the style is consistent while retaining individuality for each show.

The Results

The results? An informed public, sell-out events, marketing materials the community wants more of, and one happy client.

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Apple Country Snowmobile Club

Apt Design — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:51:13 +0000

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The Apple Country Snowmobile Club was looking for a new website that would serve a few purposes. They wanted a central hub for delivering news to members, a high-ranking site that would allow area snowmobilers to find local information, a place for new members to learn about the Club and signup to be a member, and a connection into their forray into social media. In addition the site needed to be friendly and extremely easy to use.

Instead of trying to add all of that to their old site we decided the ACSC needed to start fresh. I helped them design a minimal site that reflected the beauty of their winter playground and the warmth of the people involved. The site not only met all of their objectives, it exceeded their expectations and now helps them get information to current members and recruit new ones.

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NCW Weddings

Apt Design — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:58:32 +0000

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Kelly Allen of Full Bloom Marketing had an idea. She wanted to build an online resource for brides looking to get married in the beauty of North Central Washington. From this idea was born NCWWeddings.com. Having worked with Apt Design before she knew where to come for a uniquely designed website that delivered for both her and her visitors. After some strategy sessions and wireframing of the entire site, I designed and developed NCWWeddings.com. The site uses subtle design elements of ornamentation, texture and color to match the beauty of North Central Washington and the weddings taking place here.

Kelly now updates the site herself, doing everything from adding new posts from multiple authors to adding new ads from her vendors. Backend analytics provide her with easy-to-digest data about who is visiting her site and what they are doing, and she is also able to provide her advertisers detailed reports about the views and clicks they received on their ads.

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eBay Motors iPhone App

Apt Design — Wed, 18 May 2011 23:09:18 +0000

view the app

Its not every day that you get to work with one of the top companies on the internet to create a brand-new app for the world’s leading smartphone. Working with eBay on their new Motors iPhone app was a dream project. The Shane&Peter team brought me onboard to help create a functional, friendly user experience and a beautiful, memorable design for this new app.

The project started with Shane and I creating wireframed screens and walkthroughs of the entire app – basically thinking through how the user would use and navigate every part of the program. After that was done I turned into lead designer on the project and worked with Ryan to create the look and feel of the entire app. I put together a style that was a throwback to the idea of old baseball cards (one of the themes of the app), while still being very clean and modern. I paired rough textures with clean, sharp fonts and lots of contrast to create one of my most favorite designs I’ve worked.

The app itself is packed with features. You can browse beautiful cars, save specific searches for your car, and even create your ‘garage’ which stores info and pictures about cars you own or want to own. Go ahead and download the app in the App Store, or read Shane&Peter’s announcement of the completed project.

In the end this was a great project for everyone. My client, Shane&Peter, was super happy with the way the design turned out; eBay was delighted with the app we gave them; and dozens of great customer reviews in the App Store show that the target audience is loving this work.

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Zillow Blog

Apt Design — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:06:37 +0000

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This is another exciting project I worked on for Shane&Peter Inc. Zillow has an overall brand that we worked within to create a cleaner, more modern feeling style site. We also took a look at the content on the current blog and surfaced the most important features and stories, making the site more easily navigable by users.

As one of the two lead designers I was responsible for designing concepts of the site, detailing the final design, developing design direction, and working to make sure design elements stayed consistent across the entire site.

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AP College Football Website

Apt Design — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 03:26:25 +0000

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This is one of my first projects that I worked on as a freelancer for Shane&Peter Inc., and we started things off big. The Associated Press was looking to get some of their news and expertise directly to consumers; their rankings Poll is one of their standout enterprises. Our team was tasked with the idea of putting together a site that would showcase both their extensive depth of college football news and their proprietary AP Poll, and look good doing it.

As a site for hardcore fans you can wade deep into football stats and stories, this site has all the information you could ever want. It also has great interactive features like Create Your Own Poll and the ability to reconfigure the site based on your favorite team.

As one of the two lead designers I was responsible for designing concepts of the site, creating sections and details of the final design, interacting with the team to develop design direction, and working to make sure design elements stayed consistent across the entire site.

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Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce Website

Apt Design — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:50:17 +0000

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The Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce’s site is one of the most visited websites in the area, but was increasingly going out of date and becoming difficult to update. The Chamber has worked with Apt Design for years, and when they decided to work with me on this project I knew we had a great new site in the making.

We got to work and immediately defined our main objectives: a cleaner, brighter site that has more timely information, better content for Chamber members, and can be updated by Chamber staff. The new site meets all those objectives and more. While we focused on keeping the site a great resource for visitors and locals, we increased the functionality of the site for better resource for Chamber members. A new blog was setup where the Chamber could easily disseminate business news to the Valley. Both the Events section and the Member Directory, which were important but had been hidden, were given more priority.

Overall the site was given a brand-new fresh look that reflects the spirit of the Wenatchee Valley and the resourcefulness of it’s Chamber.

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Wenatchee Valley Sports Council Website

Apt Design — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:00:52 +0000

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The Wenatchee Valley Sports Council was in dire need of a new website. The Council is a key resource for locals and visitors interested in any and all sports facilities and happenings in the Valley. However their old site was hard to navigate, information was hard to read, and the updating process was not as quick and smooth as it could have been. Eric Granstrom approached Apt Design to help rework their site, and I was excited to work with him. The Sports Council’s new website organizes their wealth of information much better for their visitors and presents it in a much more readable format. We added the ability to update the site with News articles, and even pull in the very latest news from Twitter. Eric was thrilled to be able to update every part of the new site quickly and easily himself .