Legistics website wins Davey Award

Our new website for Legistics, Inc. has been recognized with a Silver Award in a major international design competition. The 11th Annual Davey Awards are issued by The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts. With nearly 4,000 entries from across the US and around the world, the Davey Awards honors the finest creative work from the best small agencies, firms, and companies worldwide (hence the name, based on David and Goliath).

The Davey Awards is judged and overseen by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), a 700+ member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media. Current membership represents a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms including: Code and Theory, Condé Nast, Disney, GE, Keller Crescent, Microsoft, Monster.com, MTV, Push., Publicis, Sesame Workshops, The Marketing Store, Worktank, Yahoo!, and many others.

Many thanks to our visionary client, Legistics – and especially CEO Phil Frengs – who let us take a powerful idea and run with it. And congratulations to our talented team: designer Anat Rodan, writer Emily Hutta, videographers Joel Lipton and Carlos Gutierrez and developer Stephen Slater. Awesome job!

New FreeAssociates site

Come on down! We’ve launched our new and improved website today. And we’d love to share it with you.

We invite your comments and suggestions. Thanks for your interest, your support and your friendship. We can’t do this without you.

UCLArts and Healing site goes live!

After 3-1/2 years of design, content creation and development — with many stops and starts and long pauses along the way — the new UCLArts and Healing site went live yesterday, and we couldn’t be happier!

We worked closely with the energetic and forward-looking Founding Director Ping Ho, who helped start the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), is co-developer of the program Beat the Odds: Social and Emotional Skill Building Delivered in a Framework of Drumming, and was the principal investigator of the study upon which that program was based. She was a great client — demanding, inquisitive, passionate, and open to new ideas at every turn.

UCLArts and Healing is a partnership between the Arts and Healing Initiative (a nonprofit organization), and the UCLA Collaborative Centers for Integrative Medicine. The site is intended to be a rich resource for educators, caregivers, psychotherapists, health professionals, and anyone else who is interested in using the arts as a vehicle for development, healing and growth.

We wanted to capture the energy, fun and uplifting sense of life associated with the arts — and especially with these programs — while retaining a sense of professionalism. To do that we balanced bold, playful shapes and colors with clean, well-organized typography. Differentiating UCLArts and Healing was a critical part of our design thinking. We wanted to give the organization its own authentic identity so when you arrived, you’d know it. And you’d be curious and want to know more.

Senior designer Kevin Consales and developer Chris Grau did an amazing job. Our clients, and their clients, are thrilled. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Here’s a quote from one of Ping’s latest emails:

Thanks, Josh, for your brilliance!!!  I think it will continue to blow people away and exactly meets the goals I set for the site. Thank you.

UCLArts and Healing is an organization with real vision and a powerful sense of purpose. We’re happy to have helped them further their good work.

Community Dynamics, transformed

Community Dynamics has been our client for 25 years. During that time, we’ve handled their corporate branding as well as the design and advertising for nearly all of their communities. And together along the way we’ve had some big successes and won a few national awards for marketing.

Smart guys that they are, they’re learning, rethinking and adjusting to the ever-changing real estate market. They’re now focusing more and more on urban mixed-use infill development. But their old website was still very much about suburban homes. They needed to reflect their more diversified direction, while still maintaining the equity of their brand, and of their successful history as a scrappy, independent developer.

A new website was in order. So we built one.

The repositioned Community Dynamics, poised to succeed in a tough economy, is online. Take a look.

(Thanks to associates Janina Lovern and Chris Grau for all their great work!)

Be Green celebrates new domestic manufacturing plant

When clients of ours are recognized for making a difference in the world, it’s a real pleasure to share the news. On Thursday, Be Green Packaging hosted South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley at their new manufacturing facility in Ridgeland, South Carolina. The plant creates 175 new jobs in Jasper County (which, like most places in the U.S., can definitely use them). And it shows once again how green technology is leading the way in getting the country back to work.

Be Green makes sustainable packaging from easily renewable plant materials. Originally sold to food packagers like Whole Foods, this year they expanded their business to mass-market consumer packaging. Their new Gillette Fusion ProGlide trays garnered a Diamond Award at the 23rd Annual DuPont Awards for Packaging Innovation.

As regular freePress readers know, FreeAssociates designed Be Green’s new website which their CEO told me recently “positions us perfectly….the Web site helped carry the day.”

Great companies strive to change the world in some way. They stand for something, and they let their customers know what that is. We believe creative communication supports that goal, and we do everything we can to differentiate Qelpour clients, help them find their authentic voice, put forward their strengths, and inspire their customers to connect with them.

So when our clients shine the way Be Green does…well, it’s a wonderful feeling to let you all know about it.

Crowdsourced furniture and accessories

Savanna Table by Alvaro Uribe from Stylefactory.com

Retailer Stylefactory.com is trying something new: putting the things they carry up for a vote to Make or Drop them, based on prototypes you can view on their site. It’s a nice concept, and, for the most part, the designs are very cool. Of course, if you disagree, you can vote for Stylefactory to Drop the item.

There’s a bit of danger in this approach. People may vote to Make things they can’t afford to actually buy, and which therefore will not sell. And they might want to Drop things they consider too weird and unfamiliar (sometimes new ideas need to grow on us), or that just don’t photograph well. But, overall, it seems like a fun and interesting way to test products in the development stage, and a great way to engage visitors to their site. Check it out.

 

Our new site for OPI is live!

We just got the word that the brand new site we created for Outsource Partners International has gone live, and we’re excited to share it with you. OPI is a top finance and accounting outsourcing company, with operations on three continents and an international clientele. Their target audience is primarily CFOs of major corporations.

As part of a comprehensive rebranding program, the site had to strike a balance between the high level of professionalism required when one company is trusting its most sensitive financial data to another — and the warm personal relationships that are necessary for insightful partnerships to develop. We balanced the immediacy of black & white photo journalism with a highly organized clean structural grid. Touches of bright color keep things lively and give users an aid to navigation, helping them stay oriented through a large and complex site.