Changing lives.

I met Jennifer Halstead, current owner of the new Magna Health & Fitness, while we were both working for other companies. She’s a dynamic, smart, positive, and very fit woman who knows her stuff. When she decides to do something, she does it well. And when you talk to her, she somehow makes you feel like you can do anything. She really is a Life Changer.

Magna Health & Fitness offers a lot — some services are: Personal Training, Group Fitness, BMI and Body Composition Evaluation, Dietary Evaluation, Corporate Wellness, Clinics, and more.

Basically, she does the hard parts (evaulating, planning, motivating) and you show up (okay, and work hard).

The design.

Jenny hired me to help her with her logo (check), business cards (check) and website (coming soon). In discussing her philosophy, it became clear that her approach is to make life better for her clients. Improving one’s health and fitness  doesn’t have to be a confusing, fad-dieting, body-punishing journey. It can be personalized, simplified, and fun. Magna meets you where you’re at — literally (at your home, a park near you, etc.) as well as figuratively (at your fitness level). No yelling in your face like Jillian Michaels. Well, unless you want them to.

The logo I designed uses bold, all-caps typography for the word MAGNA. It’s strong, it’s straightforward. It’s not soft,  yet it’s approachable. The swirl that’s embedded in the ‘A’, and also used in clusters as a graphic on the business card, represents the journey that’s just begun. Health and fitness should be a journey that’s tailored to our lives, and throughout our lives.

Red is eye-catching, as well as a color that’s warm, active, and alive. In designing the website I’ll be building on the color palette and will also introduce some contrasting lighter tones. (I think…)

I’m excited to be a part of this awesome new company’s brand creation and development. It feels like I’m in on a juicy secret. Feel free to contact Magna through their current website if you’re interested in their services, and stay tuned for the new website coming soon.

Logo design, illustration, and website design

This project was a delightful one. Combining my skills in illustration and logo design along with web design was so fun. Starting from scratch and working closely with my clients, I was able to bring this lovely brand to life for lovely people.

What is “bare” honey, anyway?, you might wonder. Dustin and Grace Vanasse are entrepreneurs who are making honey in the purest way: By breeding (locally) big healthy bees that create the healthiest honey around. The end product: Treatment-Free Honey. You’d be surprised what the honey industry is getting away with these days. You can find out more details on their website.

In a nutshell, their honey is: “No Pesticides. No Antibiotics. No GMO’s. No Chemicals. All Natural and Treatment Free.”

But I can attest to taste: their honey is just better. It doesn’t have the overly syrupy flavor that a lot of commercial honeys do, which from my understanding is due to the fact that the Bare Honey is never mixed with anything extra, like corn syrup. (Rumor has it a lot of imported honey is not pure honey — eek!) Also, the bees on Bare Honey farms are never given antibiotics or other unnatural treatments to help them survive. You can also connect with the Bare Honey Facebook Page to get more information on this pivotal Treatment-Free honey movement.

The sweet process

It all started out meeting with Dustin and Grace, and just tasting the honey, talking about what makes it truly different, and what their visions were for the brand. I understood right away that I was dealing with a truly unique product, and the brand could be nothing less than that. Some of the words used to describe what we were after are: Nurturing, pure, smart, playful, unconventional, local and glowing.

What I envisioned was combining illustration, vivid color, all complimented by a restful, clean white background. I spent a lot of time sketching and illustrating different logos, farm scenes, beehives, flowers, pollen, and the like:

I got to enter my “happy place” quite often during this project. Time flies when I’m drawing.

From the illustration work, I extracted 3 different theme variations, of which they liked the most fun, illustrative one (also my favorite).

Website planning & design

It is an interesting challenge to translate a brand, especially one so steeped in the sense of taste and texture, to the web. It’s almost with a story-telling like feel that the homepage opens up with an outdoor illustrated scene as well as the a photo of the actual product — bringing the two worlds together.

The site also includes a retail area, a map with hive, store and restaurant locations, and more information on what Beyond Organic / Treatment Free means.

So, check it out. Barehoney.com. Buy some honey online, or stay tuned for availability on store shelves or CSAs near you.

Competition is fierce.

And TChek knows it. This rebranding project was necessary for TChek Systems to stay current, as well as attract new types of clients as they branch out into the executive-level corporate world with their new expense tracking tools. Ackmann & Dickenson, a local website and application development company, brought me in as the branding expert and lead creative director on this project.

SaaS:  From the Ground Up

We started from the ground up with redefining the brand, which guided the redesign of the logo, website and most importantly, the application. This software as a service (SaaS) needed to be in alignment with the rebranding effort as well as provide a whip-smart, super clean user experience. The main company website design followed closely on the heels of the application design.

From Inside, Out

Your basic marketing collateral was also included in this project, such as business card and letterhead design and PowerPoint templates. There were also designed collateral on the customer side. TChek’s other main product is providing large distribution companies with fuel cards for their drivers to use. I designed some card options that fit within the graphic look and feel of the new TChek.

The Concept Behind the New Look

Since TChek is all about tracking spending, the new logo is less about the “check” and more about the actual business of displaying information easily and graphically. The logo represents the combination of a virtual card and charting/tracking. This chart-like graphic is then used as a graphic element throughout the system. The look is clean with vibrant color, which is used intentionally to guide the user experience through the application.  A brand shouldn’t feel like a set of handcuffs and rely solely on its logo to create the overall look. Instead, I wanted to provide some freedom within the brand to use just the type treatment on its own when the graphic element is strongly used — like on the business card.

http://www.tchek.com/

This made me smile — The Obsolete but Neat Laptop Case. Technology gets old so fast, shouldn’t we pay tribute to those things we once gave our full admiration to? I think so. Someday there will be an iPhone screen printed on a canvas tote, and we’ll all smile and shake our heads.

I can almost hear the whirring of the fan, smell the dust and feel those clicky keys…

And speaking of iPhones:

Food is love.

We all know someone who bakes or cooks with such passion and skill that every morsel they make is filled with that energy and love. For one of my best friends, that was her mother. I did this painting for that friend’s birthday recently in dedication to the love her mom shared with her, and all of us (her close friends) on our girls’ weekends when she would bake us a couple of these.

Detail

Detail of Frosting

As a sidenote: Painting food is something I hadn’t done before, but it was surprisingly satisfying. As I smeared on the frosting I wanted to make it appear edible. I think I drooled a little (I kept the canvas clean). My younger sister has inspired me to paint food with some of her own work — painting as well as baking. I think we should open a “bakery” gallery as a collaboration… zero guilt!

What makes a successful logo?

A company’s logo is a living thing. It needs to exude the personality of the company, as well as help customers make an easy identification. However, just like a well-balanced meal needs some veggies, a logo relies on the visual elements and language surrounding it to be truly successful.

The following are a sampling of the many logo and identity projects I’ve worked on. Each one presented unique challenges, and I enjoyed working on each one of them. On most of them I was also able to create accompanying materials or a website.

See below. More to come…

Logo and website design

Website design by Liina Lundin and development by Azul 7.

A little background

I’ve always been drawn to making facts more visually interesting. When I was about 10 years old I remember sitting in my grandma’s swiveling armchair, reading through this big book of graphs. Mostly odd statistics, like “How many Americans buy a new toothbrush every 6 months”. I couldn’t get enough of the way they made each statistic visual. You immediately got it.

User interface (UI) is a fancy term for something people need to interact with on a computer to get information. Every website is a UI. This UI is for an online software product, and it just so happens to be a UI full of information people need to “get.” It is right up my alley.

How can you see energy use?

The information people need to get by using this product is energy use. How is my company doing? How can we improve? Being an online software product, it needed to function as intuitively as possible while providing many levels of information — from a simple, quick dashboard view to the down-and-dirty data tables. Creating something this powerful was exciting to me, because energy use isn’t blatantly obvious. You can’t see it or touch it. Until software like this comes along.

User-led design & development

EnergyPrint brought together a team of design (myself, and Azul 7), and talented developers (from the Ackmann & Dickenson group). They also took a very important step in setting the stage with brand work and logo design with a local designer and brand strategist, Brent Marmo of Design:Marmo. During the entire process EnergyPrint also held user group sessions that gave us ongoing, user-based feedback that helped guide the UI design and development.

Selling it

I also designed the marketing site — just a regular website — that quickly gives interested parties an overview on what this software service provides. It’s often the first chance a potential customer may have to get a taste of what the EnergyPrint software can do: which in a nutshell, is to help corporations see their energy use so they ultimately use less, save money, and run a more efficient property (or bunch of properties).

The team at EnergyPrint is continually working on updates and enhancements, still guided by their dedicated user group. I look forward to watching the company and its product thrive and succeed.

www.energyprint.com

Sometimes the smallest things can make your day.

My husband and I went on a mini-adventure to Stillwater yesterday. There is an awesome kitchen store there, called The Chef’s Gallery. It is huge. I love kitchen stores anyway, but this one has a unique, cozy feel while offering so much to look at. I love kitchen stores because everything there has a purpose. It’s beautiful, useful stuff.

We both bought a mug. Mine matches the graphic style another mug I have of the same brand, Danica, which I bought in Minneapolis at Patina. I definitely have a mug obsession, and they had a whole wall of them. I want to go back.

Here are a few other lovely items from Danica Studio:

My good friend, Holly, is a fantastic makeup artist. She has years of experience in professional makeup application, and a true love for her field. She is an artist, and like all artists, has a keen eye for detail. She notices everything. I have to admit, I often wonder if she’s analyzing my makeup application (or lack of) when I see her. She probably is, because she just can’t help it.

Holly was the first friend to have me try a face mask, and to give me little tips like “Don’t use your forefinger to put makeup under your eyes, use your ring finger…” (because it’s gentler). Things like that, which I’d never really given thought to.

Last year, she generously offered to do my makeup for my wedding. She came in with her large case of goodies, and I felt like a movie star. I had given her free reign to do what she pleased. She somehow managed to apply eye makeup that didn’t smear or smudge throughout the day, even through many happy tears. She did an absolutely perfect job. It just goes to show — when people are experts in their craft, trust them and let them do what they love — and do so well.

Now Holly is taking a step forward in her career and looking to expand her services to work with professional photographers. I had the fun job of putting together a few of Holly’s photos for a marketing PDF she’s sending out. If you want to contact Holly, let me know and I can connect you.

She’s so good, I wish I could keep her in my makeup bag.

Fresh, warm air. Trees budding. Warm sunshine. Spring is so inspiring! I had fun sketching in the sunshine this weekend, using my Japanese Sumi Brush pen. The color was added afterwards in Adobe Illustrator. I like the playful, innocent nature of the flowers and tree with the bird silhouetted in the sun on the branch.