Blog Archives

BIRTHFIT Website Redesign | www.birthfit.com | Venice, CA

12/26/2015

BIRTHFIT is a resource & support community for pregnant and postpartum women around the world. They already had a WordPress site but it needed some help. The site was several years old and badly needed a navigation redesign, up-to-date content, and links to outside sites for services, sign up forms, and affiliate marketing.

BIRTHFIT already had tons of blog posts from over the years, so they wanted to stick with WordPress just make updates to the structure, home page, and design to make the site more appealing to the BIRTHFIT audience.

The movement is growing crazy fast (just check out their instagram & facebook accounts) and the site needed an upgrade to support the growth so far and beyond.

The site redesign now boasts a sliding home page banner with click-throughs to popular pages. There is now a link to the online store, an affiliate sign up process and ways to connect with each affiliate around the country. The resources offered by BIRTHFIT and their affiliates are now organized under Services and Education. Webinars, eBooks, and a multitude of great blog posts are available for free or for purchase through the site and outside platforms.

Services at the Venice, CA, headquarters can now be scheduled through buttons in the site and a sidebar on each page showcases most popular posts as well as featured sponsors (who can purchase ad space on a monthly basis to bring in some ongoing income for the company).

I love the way this redesign worked out and I'm excited for my ongoing relationship with this team of game changers! Click through the slides below to see images of the pages, or visit www.birthfit.com to see the site in action.

Like this? I build lots of websites using a variety of site builders, from WordPress to SquareSpace, Wix to Weebly. Check out more on my websites page or shoot me an email and let's talk about what you're looking for!

I illustrated a book! "How to Retire from Edison" by Cedarstone Advisors

12/24/2015

Front Cover (above)

Title Page >>

Cedarstone Advisors offers financial advising for wealth management at any age and stage of life. The firm does a lot of advising for Edison employees looking at retiring and they decided to compile their years of knowledge and advice into an approachable, readable book.

How can you make financial information approachable and readable? Add some simple illustrations!

Take a look at a few of my favorite illustrations (below), all executed with my trusty Wacom tablet and a chalk brush.

A few of the illustrations throughout:

Chapter headings, graphs, charts, diagrams. Most of the illustrations were meant to make the concepts in the text feel more understandable by the average reader. I chose a hand-drawn, chalkboard feel to achieve this. Anyone can understand retirement financial planning!

Branding & Website Design for Pepperdine's Drone Entrepreneurship Conference

12/24/2015

The Pepperdine School of Law and the Palmer Center for Entrepreneurship & the Law wanted to host an event that brought together the tech community. The subject is drones, particularly entrepreneurship in the drone sector. The target audience is young, tech savvy, and slightly geeky. The Palmer Center wanted a branding scheme that appealed to the target audience and a website platform that allowed for online registration and to showcase the content of the event.

Once all that was complete, they needed t-shirts, event print materials, and a variety of collateral to support the event experience. I used a clean black & white color scheme with hits of Pepperdine's orange & blue. Take a look!

Event Branding & Collateral:

Website:

Front/Back of a 4x6 post card for direct mail:

Like this? A branding scheme that shows up in social media posts, print materials, and digital broadcast forums (like a website) is called an integrated marketing strategy. These projects are a BLAST for me because I get to do it all and every piece matches.

Interested in something like this? Shoot me an email! Want to see more websites? Check them out on my websites page.

Farm & Flame Catering Website | www.farmandflame.com

12/24/2015

Farm & Flame is a full-service catering company based in Westlake Village, California, and serving fresh, locally sourced, farm to table food at gatherings of all sizes in the Malibu, Thousand Oaks, Westlake area and beyond.

They needed a website to serve as a platform for lots of juicy and colorful food photography, contact information & rotating sample menus for seasonal gatherings and standard fare. Farm & Flame's aesthetic is based on rough-hewn wood, crisp photography, and vintage Americana.

We built a mobile-responsive site that features sliding images, a gallery on the home page, and text menus that look great but can still be read by search engines!

Click through the slideshow (below) or visit the live site at www.farmandflame.com.

Food photography credit: Cecily Breeding

Like this? More sites on my websites page.

Bookable Voice-Over Coaching just launched their new site!

12/23/2015

Bookable Voice-Over Coaching & Demos is a Malibu-based voice-over service that brings voice-over work within reach for anyone. Rick Wasserman, the 10-year signature voice of AMC, offers coaching, workshops, demo production and a host of other services to clients in and around the LA area as well as around the world via Skype.

Rick wanted a logo that demonstrated a playful stamp, just like new voice-over actors will become BOOKABLE once putting in some time with Rick. Once we had the stamp, we put together a site that drew on the classic red, black, and white color scheme of a recording studio.

Check out Bookable's site in action at www.bookablevo.com or click through the slides below.

Like this? I build lots of sites, ranging from basic one-pagers to more complex structures. Check out other sites I've built here. If you've started wondering whether it's time for your company to build (or re-build) a site, you probably needed one months ago! Shoot me an email and let's get started today.

Portfolio Websites for College Applications

12/14/2015

It's been 10 years since I applied to universities, but it might as well have been a hundred. When I was a high school senior, I listed extracurricular involvement on five 2-inch blank lines and tried to paint a picture of my service resume with printed words on a page. Today, high school seniors are using the power of websites to supplement their common applications and personal statements. Two of these high school seniors approached me to build something clean and attractive to showcase their personalities and accomplishments.

Charlotte and Olivia each put their own personality into their sites and we created a simple yet powerful brand identity for each of their sites to match each of the students' personal presentation. Charlotte was personal and earthy. Olivia was minimalist and fashion-forward.

Charlotte highlighted the breadth of her experiences and talents by showcasing her original paintings, the fundraising projects she implemented for mission trips, and her dedication to helping the less fortunate in mission work with Operation Smile & Made in the Streets.

Click through Charlotte's site at www.charlotterjackson.com

Olivia chose to showcase her beautiful photography, to which she has shown tremendous dedication over her high school years. We created a page for each genre of her photography interests, with full-width banners, captions providing more information about the various frames and projects, and tying it all together with an about page, sharing her artistic vision.

Click through Olivia's site at www.olainebarrett.com

Team Building & a Night Hike at Chumash Ridge, Malibu, CA | 12-06-15

12/13/2015

It's hard to explain what happened last Sunday to someone who wasn't there. To an outside observer, we were a bunch of college kids wearing backpacks, doing burpees and various odd-looking challenges and procedures in a gravel parking lot.
To the informed eye, this was Trek Iceland Selection.
A weighted backpack (with penalties for being too light). Burpees for time. Bag pulls for time. A hunk of lumber posing as an "injured hiker." Solving rope knots & riddles together in the dark, only to head up the mountain into the unknown.
19 college students showed up and gave it their best for their team and for the selection process. Absolutely any of them would have been excellent additions to the expedition team, but we could only accept 13 members this year.
Congratulations to our final team and I can't wait to explore the landscape of Iceland and of our inner lives together in July!
For more about the trip, visit the UCC Campus Ministry website. www.ucccm.com/iceland

Like these? I shoot lots of events! Check out my events page or shoot me an email if you're looking for coverage of an upcoming activity.

Taylor Family Portraits | Point Dume, Malibu, CA

12/8/2015

Macalee & Blaze and their fur baby, Lace, wanted to wish friends and family a Merry Christmas in true California fashion by rubbing in the fact that it's still 70° in November and the sun sets over the beach like this every. single. day. WOW.

I had a great time scrambling all over the rocks and trails at Point Dume with Macalee & Blaze. Merry Christmas to you both and let's play again soon!