Author Archives: Elizabeth

Hunter Qualitative

by

Hunter Qualitative Image

We feel a kindred connection to Hunter Qualitative, we are both creative firms with a love for telling people’s stories. We both take an obsessive approach to getting to know our client and we have fun doing it! As with all of our projects, we took the time to understand their business, we analyzed the competition and made suggestions to give Hunter an edge. Their work is informative, artistic, insightful and engaging. Needmore set out to make a website worthy of the clever crew at Hunter Qualitative.

We took time getting a feel for Hunter’s personality: meeting with the founder Jon McNeil, reading Hunter’s published work, watching their documentaries and brainstorming the most creative ways to showcase their work on the website. Case in point, Jon referenced the movie Rushmore as design inspiration. That very night our designer, watched Rushmore for homework and came back in the mooring brimming with ideas to implement into the site design.

What can we say, design is serious business folks. If you are hungry for the details, please take a look at our portfolio.

March 2013 at a Glance

by

IMG_2537

March 2013 was a glorious month in Portland, Oregon. The birds were chirping, rainbows sprouted out of the sky and we even got an occasional visit from that bright ball in the sky (my sources inform me it is called the Sun). Squirrels have been hoping around the courtyard with nuts in their mouths, Ray even broke into song a few times, (okay, to be fair Ray singing is a regular occurrence), but you get the picture.  It is practically a Disney movie over here at the Needmore Studio.

If you don’t believe me take a look at our rap sheet for March:

IVC Website Redesign

by

IVC Website

Interventional and Vascular Consultants approached Needmore Designs with their logo in hand and a smile. The IVC project began as a blank slate. Well, a blank slate with the need for some major information architecture.

IVC specializes in nonsurgical vascular procedures and their goal is to improve the health in their patients. They are currently the only stand-alone Interventional Radiology practice in the Pacific Northwest and potential patients come to their website looking for help and information. As such, the website has a host of medical information about specific medical procedures. We took a look at the big picture and thought about how best to organize their website in a clear and concise way. We took extra care to make sure that the website was well laid out and that the website felt clean and trustworthy.

The vascular procedures were a section filled with lots of content and we felt a lot of work was needed to present this cleanly. Because there is a large amount of small text, we made a great mobile version of the website. Should folks have a question or need to look something up on their way to the appointment or when visiting another practice, it’s fast and easy to do.

With the big picture in mind, we brainstormed different design ideas and eventually came up with the idea to show leaves to illustrate the veins. We searched and searched, but felt that anatomical illustration was not only often too graphic for the audience, but reminded us of less pleasant aspects of visiting a specialist. In addition, we loved the clean and natural symbolism that the leaves brought to the project, and it inspired our design to become even cleaner and more modern. The images of leaves evoked the healing thoughts of nature and a frank approach to the design of the website. As an accent color to bring out the headlines, we chose a light aqua. The experience becomes even more relaxing, especially with the faint silhouette on the interior pages.

We hope you love visiting this simple, beautiful, and clean website as much as we enjoyed crafting it.

Why Businesses should be Courting Blogs

by

Blogs are marketing gold, but this is hardly groundbreaking news.

What is surprising is that many businesses are not capitalizing on these marketing opportunities as often as they should. Beyond the opportunity to get your brand in front of a new audience, there is another important reason to be marketing your product/services on blogs—it can improve your SEO.

The reason: the all mighty backlink.


Brand New Website for Gist Brands

by

gist-work6

Gist Brands (the artist formerly known as View Design) is a brand agency that specializes in bringing established brands into a new era. With their own rebrand fresh off the press, Gist looked to Needmore Designs to make a Website worthy of their brand spanking new identity.

Naturally, we were game.


Stumptown Website Version 6.0

by

The New Stumptown Coffee Website

We first built a website for Stumptown in the Fall of 2000.

Actually, Ray did, because Needmore hadn’t even been born yet. As you may already know, our Creative Director was Stumptown’s first Barista back when they opened their doors on Division in 1999. Ray has been designing their websites ever since.

Over the next dozen years, the site went through half as many revisions. For a while, it was built in Flash, then after the iPhone started becoming popular, a redesign brought it the smooth grey curves that lasted for three and a half years.

Finally, working closely with the Stumptown Creative Department, we embarked on a project to bring the website into a new era. Magento was chosen to handle the exacting needs of their sophisticated ordering system, while WordPress was ideally suited for the content-rich, education-driven site they really wanted. Stumptown feels that the better folks understand coffee, the more they’ll want to buy from Stumptown, and we couldn’t agree more.

Because we were building this site to last, we took plenty of time to get it right. This started with extensive planning meetings involving numerous internal Stumptown staff stopping by Needmore for half-day brainstorming and planning sessions. With the goals firmly captured, we moved on to a very productive several rounds of mockups, exploring several very different approaches before arriving at the direction you see now.

Here are some design mockups we considered:

  • Mock Up Version 1
  • Mock Up Version 3
  • Mock up Version 4
  • Needmore Stumptown Mock Up Version 5
  • Needmore Stumptown Mock Up Version 6
  • Needmore Stumptown Mock Up Version 7

Because we are anthropologists at heart, we are all about tellings people stories. We were pumped to tell the Stumptown story and show the faces of the people behind Portland’s favorite staple. This most recent iteration includes producer profiles, so that you can see the real people that harvest the beans for Stumptown, and see first-hand the process that goes into every Stumptown roast.

Overall, the project was a resounding success, and launched in December of 2012. It features hundreds of pages of content and thousands of gorgeous photos. A new highlight video is being prepared for the home page, and all of the ordering and shipping is coordinated by the Magento-powered backend. In previous versions, the Stumptown website was only selling coffee. Now, they are selling grinders, coffee filters, mugs, and of course their signature beans. Virtually every piece of content on the site can be updated by Stumptown in-house, and the staff has been trained to be comfortable working with these systems.

Visit Stumptown Coffee Roasters to see the results. We hope you enjoy it.

Happy Holidays!

by

Needmore Designs

It’s been a great year. And, a delightfully busy one. Thanks to everyone we worked with this year. We couldn’t be more honored to have such wonderful relationships with such amazing people.

We had a blast getting the following projects off the ground. Whether working on a new project or a fresh redesign for an existing client, we love launching websites!

Stumptown Coffee Roasters
Löyly
Sea Urchin
Children’s Community School
Beals Design-Build
Better Together Bake Shop
Curly Tail Pug Rescue
Ultimate Choice
J&R Group
Salt & Straw Shop
Savoir Flair
Ute City Cycles
Vignette Brand Communications

We already can’t wait for 2013, and to show you what we’ve got up our sleeve next.

Thank you.