Then we make sure they see it.
Beautiful Design • Great Content • Brilliant Marketing
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!
I recently finished the redesign of The Reinvention Institute and wanted to give it some airplay here. It’s in the portfolio already, but I know not everyone heads in there.
The Reinvention Institute is run by Pamela Mitchell, its CEO and Chief Vision Officer. (Is that not the coolest title ever? Chief Vision Officer…love it.) Pamela is an amazing woman and was a total blast to work with. And to say she is a consummate professional is sort of like saying Winston Churchill was an alright orator.
Pamela has the Midas touch. Every email and phone call we had was a reminder that some people cannot help being very very good at what they do. That’s Pamela.
As to the site, what you see is pretty similar to what the site was before I got to it. It was a little older looking, a bit musty and shop worn but still a great site. Pamela wanted some new boots for it so we gave it some new boots. It turned out very nicely, with a TON of luscious white space, a great color scheme and some nice iconic navigation.
Could say more, but that would be beating it to death. Just have a look at the screenshot or, better yet, head over to The Institute to check it out. And if you need to reinvent yourself, your business or your career…that’s the place to do it. Tell Pamela I sent you. She’ll probably say, “Who?”
Just when you thought nothing new could be done with RSS buttons, I’ve gone ahead and proved it by making one of my own. It’s just like all the other RSS buttons out there. Only different.
This one was lovingly crafted by myself, in the forge of Cinema 4D. It’s got reflections, glass-like finishes and an oh-so-jaunty angle to it. It oozes raw sex appeal and screams “Click Me! Click Me!” which is just what you want for an RSS icon.
“Where can I get one for myself?” is what you’re probably saying right now. Well, I’ve added a new page to Charfish and called it “Goodies.” And because I like things really simple stupid, I’ve also added a new button to the navigation bar above and cleverly called it “Goodies” as well.
Click it once and you’ll be transported to a page where this slick new RSS button is available for download. Click it twice and nothing at all will happen ’cause you’ll already be there.
There are two versions of the RSS button, one with a drop shadow and one without. Each version is a transparency-supported .png image so it will fit on any background of any color.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, it can’t. It’s just an RSS button after all. Go get yours now!
