Then we make sure they see it.
Beautiful Design • Great Content • Brilliant Marketing
The last post I wrote on Charfish was dated 19 May, 2008. That’s almost 3 months ago. Shameful, I know. Because of my absence, I think it only fair I tell you where I’ve been and where I’m going with this phenomenon called Charfish.
Where have I been?
I’ve been right here. Yup, the whole time.
There. Wasn’t that fun?
In all truth I’ve been busy. Insanely so. 18-hour days sort of busy. At the current moment I’ve got 16 projects cooking all at the same time.
They say if you need something done, give it to a busy man. Well, that’s me. In the past couple months I’ve done everything: album covers, book covers, book design, some writing gigs, about 8000 website/blog designs and about triple that in headers and banners.
I haven’t blogged because, well, I’ve been busy with the things that pull in the dough.
That’s not totally cool to you readers, though, is it? From the comments and emails I’ve gotten here at Charfish, I know a small number of readers (zero) care about how much money I’m making or how busy I am. The more popular posts here are about how to run a business, how to design, things like that. Having realized that, I can start cranking out some more content for you.
Read more →
This site and the company behind it began as a design firm in mid-2007. Actually, Charfish was around long before that, but 2007 saw it registered as a legal, tax-paying LLC.
At its inception we (or rather I, since it was still a one-man-band at that time) were a design firm. My intention was to do top-end web and blog design. I did exactly that for about two weeks.
And then they came.
Clients. They kept coming and they kept bringing more. Questions like, “Well, you’ve designed our banner, why don’t you just design our whole site?” became more and more common. As did, “If you can design websites, you can probably design books as well, right? Why don’t you design my ebook for me?”
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If my mom had told me making money would be this fun, I’d have gone to check with my dad.
ThreeGears.com recently hired me to create some napkin sketch style artwork for his sales/support process.
The Sketches
The sketches were created first with good ol’ pencil and paper and later redrawn in Illustrator. The final versions shown here represent the phases that any company goes through between its formation and its back end support structure:
- Start-up
- Sales
- Service
- Support
Sketches like these are a great way to show your customers what your business is all about. They can also, in short order, show your site visitors how to get around, how your process works, where step one is, etc.
What’s the benefit of these hand-drawn icons?
Before I answer that, let’s have a look at the web. The whole thing. What is it? Primarily and simply, it’s just a visual medium for getting your point across. It being a visual medium, it’s one that your visitors scan. Meaning their eyes go from headline to sub-heading, to an image, to bold text, etc.
That’s not news, and it’s why people have been generally getting better at typography, why images are more and more common in web pages and so forth.
But the funny thing, the web is getting very polished now. On the web, corners are always perfectly square or perfectly round. Circles are perfect circles. Precise grid systems are more and more evident. It’s all just so squeaky clean now which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just ordinary and anything ordinary isn’t grabbing as much attention as it can.
Wake up the web!
The solution to a polished (and maybe slightly stagnant) website is to go the other route and give your visitors something different to look at. What’s different on the web nowadays? Wavy lines, sketches, imperfect fills and gradients, hand-writing, pencil strokes.
Try this on for size:
I mean, look how slick that is. In all its simplicity, that icon just looks awesome. As an icon it’s interesting, it’s cute, it’s well-behaved…if I had a daughter I’d let her date that little icon for sure. Or his friend who looks like this:
He’s just as cool, although a tad on the heavy side. I’m sure you see the point, yes? These icons are perfect for your scanning readers.
Now what?
A little while ago, we at Charfish wrote a post about breathing. Now, just a few short months later, everyone’s doing it. I have no doubt that something similar is going to happen now that we’ve unwrapped the genius of napkin sketches.
Lest you be left behind in the new race to feature old-world, hand-crafted iconography on your site, you should probably write me immediately. Let me know what kind of drawings I can do for you!