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IVC Website Redesign

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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.

A-Z: Abstract to Zen

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One of my favorite benefits of living in Portland is the nourishing nature that surrounds our beautiful city. Searching for a creative catalyst, I visited The Portland Japanese Garden (my surefire cure for spring fever). After pausing by the waterfall in the Strolling Pond Garden, I walked up to the pavilion to enjoy the current Art in the Garden exhibit.

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The Portland Japanese Garden celebrates it’s 50th anniversary in 2013. To honor this special occasion, three unique Art in the Garden exhibitions will be featured throughout the year. 50 Prints and Paintings, Toko Shinoda at 100 is the first, on view through this Sunday, March 17th.

Celebrated as one of Japan’s leading modern calligraphers, Japanese artist Toko Shinoda just celebrated her 99th birthday in 2012. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, Shinoda has called her work “a balance between dynamism and traditional elegance.” The Art in the Garden exhibit includes a piece of her work from each year of the Garden’s history, starting in 1963 through today.

My impression upon viewing her work: Powerful.

I’ve always been an avid fan of the tactile sensation of viewing calligraphy — you can almost feel the brush in your hand. Walking among the combination of bold, energetic brushstrokes placed vividly amongst active white space — I was transported into Shinoda’s world. I was astonished by her ability to evoke vivid emotions using only minimal form and a select few colors (most pieces used black sumo ink with a touch of gold, red, or blue).

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Personal Favorites from the show included:

In the Twilight, Lithograph with Calligraphy Strokes

Setting Forth, Lithograph with hand added colors gold and gray

Moon and Flowers, Sumi and cinnabar ink on paper

The exhibit ends it run this Sunday, March 17, 2013. Enjoy this rare glimpse from Tokyo while it’s still nestled in the City of Roses.

Have you visited the exhibit? Tweet us your thoughts on Twitter to @needmore.

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4: Pat Castaldo on The Job

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Pat Castaldo is co-founder of Buy Olympia and proprietor of The Land Gallery. But knowing about his collection of vintage pinball games, we couldn’t help but talk about that.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.

Pat Castaldo is on The Job.

How to Ask the Right Questions to Solicit Meaningful Testimonials

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We all know that hearing a recommendation from a friend goes a long way in getting us to try a new service or restaurant or just about anything else. And, testimonials are the online equivalent of this more personal recommendation. Yet, we often fail to get them right. Do you ever go to a website and read testimonials that feel fake or contrived? The secret is to solicit the right kind of testimonial.

Needmore Client Testimonials

Before you invite the accolades to start rolling in, the most critical step in getting a good testimonial is to do good work. If you want folks to say truly believable and positive things about you, you need to focus on good relationships with your collaborators and clients. Without that, nobody is going to have anything believably good to say about you.


Responsive Retrofitting

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We recently had the opportunity to revisit the Cooke Orthodontics site we launched in March, 2010. Ethan Marcotte was still a couple months away from publishing his first article about responsive web design in A List Apart at that point, so not at all surprisingly, the site was built with a fixed-width, centered layout. Dr. Cooke and her team were recently seeing a noticeable increase in non-desktop visitors to the site and asked if we could make that experience a little better. We agreed, of course, because we like good, device-agnostic web experiences as much as the next geek, but also because taking an existing design and retrofitting it to work across devices and screen sizes poses a number of interesting and fun challenges. (Well, what we call fun around here, anyway.)


3: Martyn Leaper of The Minders on The Job

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After 7 long years, The Minders are back in the studio and working on a new album. Ray sat down with Martyn Leaper to talk about his history, thoughts on music, and how much good music was recorded before electronics.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.

The Job

Why Businesses should be Courting Blogs

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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.


2: Tommy Habetz on Thinking, Growing, and Cooking, on The Job

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Interview with Tommy Habetz

For this episode we chat with Dan Manchester about the movie Cannonball Run, which Ray watched over the weekend. We then have a conversation with Tommy Habetz, responsible for several of Portland’s most exciting restaurants such as Bunk Sandwiches, Bunk Bar, and now Trigger.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.

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9 Tips for Getting Started in Web Design

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In the midst of chatting with students, giving advice to emerging website designers, and spouting philosophy on our podcast, The Job, I’ve been reminiscing quite a bit about the early days at Needmore.

We were a scrappy duo, pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and making it work. Nine years later, being part of the team at Needmore is something I love. I get to spend my days talking to clients and potential clients, learning their stories, and crafting sites that tell these stories beautifully and elegantly.

I think this is just about the best job and am grateful to be here today. But it wasn’t always easy. If I could go back to those early days, there are a few core truths I’d love to have known straight away. These are lessons that took years to learn and many were learned the hard way. In no particular order, here’s some advice from the front on starting a web design business.