navreenGrewal

THE BRANDING

LeadsCon was the first foray into rebranding efforts with the new logo. The company had a loose idea of what direction they wanted to go, and this event was the impetus to shape it even further.

THE CONUNDRUM

Creating a design that would translate to multiple final products in a very short amount of time.

PROCESS

• Aggregate and finalize core messaging
• Provide three initial varieties for solutions
• Finalize and refine solution (SUCCEED "wordle")
• Supply final design for various deliverables

Coordinating with business development, we decided that the messaging needed to convey to current and potential vendors/partners that All Star had established its priority as being a lead provider of quality and consistency in the industry. All Star wanted to position itself as the key to success for both businesses and for prospective students. Our old logo had been rather non-descript, so we wanted to build a brand that was recognizable and distinct from competitors.

With this in mind, I created a design that would stand apart from the overly glossy ads of our competitors. They tended to lean on trendy, web 2.0 designs and stock imagery. I aimed for a design that felt more genuine, authentic, and utilized white space in a way that the dead-center text ads did not. One of the solutions I created, which would be the final choice, was a poster style ad that put the "wordle" which spelled SUCCEED in the forefront and used the All Star symbol to balance it. The bold shapes and label-like quality of the SUCCEED wordle lent itself well to the variety of final products it needed to transition onto.

THE CONUNDRUM

All Star had a new logo, but their corporate website was still sorely outdated.

THE EVOLUTION

The new logo was a drastic change from the previous one, which had been around since the beginning of the company 8 years ago. The company itself had undergone many changes to position itself as an industry leader. They wanted this image to be loud and clear through rebranding.

PROCESS

• Work with business development, content team, and creative director to filter core copy
• Collaborate with creative director to ideate designs
• Select and finalize a design style
• Build out pages according to style in Photoshop
• Coordinate photo shoots of executives, employees, and office space for assets
• Build pages in HTML/CSS/Javascript
• Debug and cross-browser test

The rebrand was an effort to revitalize All Star's B-to-B image with customers and partners. The design team collaborated to work out a style that would represent the company's changes. The influence of this endeavor would then be used to rebrand All Star's various properties in order to attract more users on the B-to-C side.

Content and Business Development reworked the copy and messaging, and they needed a new look to package it all in. From there, I coordinated with the creative director to establish a style that would be consistent across all the pages. I mocked up the pages, created icon assets, and scheduled several photo shoots to acquire unique image assets. After the comps underwent a couple of reviews, I coded out the pages and the interactive slideshow on the homepage.

THE CLIENT

Independent industrial designer

THE PRODUCT

A unique and literally magnetic product to pin up clothing (a little like cufflinks that can be worn anywhere), utilizing scrap galvanized steel.

THE CONUNDRUM

Selling Cakes beyond the appeal of it being a "green" recycled product.

PROCESS

• Brainstorm key concepts and messaging
• Sketch and construct wireframes and sitemap
• Sketch out storyboard for commercial
• Provide three initial varieties for website solutions
• Finalize design, set up photo shoots, and collect miscellaneous assets
• Film raw footage for commercial and mix auditory assets in Soundbooth
• Construct site in Photoshop, build it out in Flash
• Design and build Flash app
• Post-production work on commercial
• Debug

We agreed the focus should be making the appeal of CAKES as a trendy fashion accessory that could be personalized and worn decoratively as well as practically. The idea was to target a younger audience that gravitates towards buying Sketchers and Marc Ecko.

By creating a promotional video and an interactive app, I tried to create a fun, individual, and active image to associate with the brand. The idea was not just to get kids to wear them, but to also be creative about how they wore them.

THE CONUNDRUM

A good deal of national salary info found across All Star's pages were displayed in the form HTML tables.

THAT'S A LOT OF TEXT

It sure is. To display the information in a more digestible way, I developed a Flash piece that allows users to get information on cities that are relevant to them.

PROCESS

• Sketch out several solutions to displaying the information
• Define scope of user experience and refine design
• Summarize steps for code
• Build final design and code
• Debug

All Star's sites tend to have a lot of information but they are often overlooked by users because of their lack of treatment. Salary data was a key opportunity for retaining visitors. It tended to draw a lot of traffic but also had a high bounce rate as the information was likely too dense. Rather than just deliver it in the form of an HTML table, I built a Flash piece that would replace that table on page load and give the user the ability to quickly compare Counselor and Psychologist salaries for cities they were specifically interested in. For the sake of being able to easily edit the data without having to get into Flash (for the convenience of the content team, as well as myself), I stored the data in an external XML file.

THE CONUNDRUM

Get users to convert on these pages.

THE PLAN

Test a multitude of layouts, imagery, messaging, calls to action, and content to see what users respond to.

PROCESS

• Aggregate previous learning
• Clarify concepts and ideas for testing
• Collect first round of assets and key messagin
• Sketch and iterate through designs
• Build final design and code
• Debug for cross-browser compatibility

This ongoing project gave me the opportunity to constantly try to innovate and experiment in a constrained environment. The formula for a perfect landing page is something every internet marketer seeks to master in hopes of converting the highest possible number of users.

THE DISCLAIMER

I feel it's important to clarify immediately that this video is not meant to pick a side or incite a particular call to action. The Arab-Israeli conflict is wrought with a very long and complicated past, and, during the time I made this video, it was brought once again to the fore as an international issue.

PATTERNS OF WAR
AND PERSECUTION

They are nothing new. Its cyclical nature and the speed of escalation can be found in numerous examples both present and past, from Darfur to Myanmar to Iraq. Even knowing this, creating this video and juxtaposing the present and the past made that fact incredibly palpable.

THE CONUNDRUM

Expressing all of the above in video with limited assets.

PROCESS

The original idea behind this project was to explore the dynamic between visuals and sound in the form of a music video. The exercise involved setting free music from renderyard to a collection of random footage from the Prelinger Archives

As I started collecting assets and ideating in December 2008, the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine was broken and the Gaza War began. It was disheartening to hear that, once again, things had escalated to a point that retaliations were severe and civilian casualties were high. Between watching the news coverage, I stumbled onto a video in Prelinger called Sands of Sorrow.

The general public reaction to news of the war seemed to be, "Oh, this again." Watching this black & white video from 1950 in conjunction with the color video aired on news networks, I wondered "This? Again?" Introduced by Dorothy Thompson, a woman who is described as the "First Lady of American Journalism," Sands of Sorrow explains the humanitarian emergency following the Arab-Israeli War. It describes 750,000 displaced Arabs living in refugee camps with a mortality rate that had been, before receiving aid, 120 deaths a night. The war was preceded by numerous civil wars as land divisions were proposed and rejected after World War II.

"These are the scenes the world has not had an opportunity to see," said the narrator toward the end. That statement drove home the impact video footage had on communicating crises such as these to the public. I decided to abandon my current progress and change direction after watching it. I was immediately struck by statements made through the video that unknowingly and chillingly foreshadowed such a turbulent future. Nowhere was this more apparent than when the narrator addressed the refugee children. "What will be in store for them when they grow past school age? Are they, too, to be doomed to a continuing life of uncertainty and lack of hope, such as is now the lot of their parents?"

While I continued to research and collect video, Al-Jazeera announced that they were releasing their footage online under Creative Commons licensing to promote its distribution and use. The story seemed to tell itself as I pulled together the video. The first scenes are from a tourist view of Damascus and Jerusalem in 1936. From there, the footage transitions into scenes from Sands of Sorrow, which I really recommend seeing the entirety of. As the camera follows the road that many refugees had walked fleeing old Palestine to Gaza, I tried to create a transition of time as well as place. The roads, the people, the makeshift homes, they are different but the same. Over 50 years later, the next generation has grown, and it's telling that this is the only reality they know.