During 2010, we began a new branding project for a marketing research firm, which is getting close to it’s launch date. This project started at the very beginning, with a brand identity template and brand manifesto, followed by the selection of a new company name, logo design, core content development, website design… and we’re getting close. It’s exciting.

If it’s January, we must be working on the Annual Dinner & Symposium event for the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute. Lisa is working on collateral designs as this blog entry is being written. This year’s theme is a good one… “Patient Centered Research: Maximizing Outcomes, Minimizing Disparities.” We’re happy to support any effort to get quality healthcare to all who need it, regardless of their circumstances.

We’re also in the process of updating the design and functionality of the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor website. This site was developed as a marketing initiative site for the Kansas City Area Development Council. Unbeknownst to many, the Kansas City area is home to the world’s largest concentration of animal health and nutrition companies.

And of course, in addition to our larger projects, we’re performing ongoing maintenance work for many clients. One example is Portland-based PAE Consulting Engineers, a firm that recently opened a new San Francisco office and has needed support with its email and website announcements.

LONG TIME CLIENTS

We spent a lot of quality time with long term clients Kansas City Area Development Council (KCADC) and Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute (KCALSI).

KCADC’s principal website — ThinkKC.com — continues to evolve and add new features and capabilities, including a brand new blog! The challenge in developing their new blog was to develop a completely seamless integration of a WordPress blog into this existing (and very complex) website.

Plus, we worked with KCADC to upgrade and launch a variety of smaller, targeted websites supporting special marketing initiatives, such as the new KCAdvancedEnergy.com site. KCADC has long been a pioneer in the use of the web for economic development and business recruitment.

We also worked with KC SmartPort, one of KCADC’s partner organizations, to update the look of their website and restructure the site’s content architecture. A new feature added to the site is an interactive map system that shows available commercial real estate properties.

KC SmartPort also had us create a new front-end design for their Real Trade Data online application, which is integrated into a new Trade Data Exchange website.

We worked with KCALSI on their Annual Dinner & Symposium and the Research Symposium they hold each year in conjunction with the CVC Central convention.

These are major efforts that require both web support and extensive collateral design, including direct mail pieces, advertising, publication design, and event handouts and signage. We also began a redesign effort for KCALSI’s website, which will deliver during 2011.

Another longtime client we helped through a challenging process this past year was the SimmsMann-UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology. The staff at the Center decided to provide a way for their patients and clients to purchase health supplements and cancer care items online. We worked with multiple vendors to help them put their new program into place.

WORDPRESS SITES

2010 turned out to be the year we jumped into WordPress site design with both feet. In addition to the aforementioned blog we added to ThinkKC.com, we developed five new WordPress sites for new clients, some of which incorporate blogs and a couple that simply take advantage of WordPress plug-ins and its superb Content Management System (CMS). Our new WordPress sites include:

Mason Bruce & Girard – a natural resources consulting firm headquartered in Portland. For this site, we selected WordPress because the client wanted a full featured Content Management System. A fun aspect of this project included several scenic photo shoots. We worked with Portland photographer Amy Ouellette.

Hollywood Farmers Market – a popular farmers market located in Portland’s Hollywood neighborhood. We created a WordPress structure that incorporates a blog into the site’s homepage. Using this approach allowed the client to keep the homepage fresh with the latest market news by using her blog posts.

Lantana Consulting – a nationwide consulting practice specializing in new healthcare document standards. As one might expect, the real strength of a consulting practice like Lantana is its consultants, all of whom are introduced via a complex jQuery feature element on the homepage. We worked with Optimal Accords owner Joy Kuhl on this project.

Crossroads Christian Church – a protestant church located in Shawnee, Kansas. We selected WordPress for this website because of ease of integrating a number of effective WordPress plug-ins to accommodate the site’s complex requirements, as well as the need to provide the client with a powerful CMS.

Boodleworld – a blog-centric site developed for a California-based financial planner. The client wanted to feature a book he was writing and promote a national conversation about money. A blog made perfect sense as a tool to support that conversation.

I Heart Oregon – this is Lisa’s personal hiking and outdoor adventure blog. It was Lisa’s passion for hiking that led to her development of the blog, but it was her passion for design and technology that led her to refine her custom WordPress template design capabilities until she could make the blog look and behave exactly the way she wanted.

OUTREACH EFFORTS

Lisa was very active this year with her AIGA Portland sustainability work, plus she attended three conferences related to advancing technology. Investments in technology training included a March trip to Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive, followed up with attendance at Portland’s annual WebVisions and WordCamp conferences later in the year.

In her role as Sustainability Chair on the board of AIGA Portland, Lisa and her sustainability team organized a series of successful events promoting the development of sustainable design practices. Foremost among these is the popular SHIFT event, where 10 different participants each present for five minutes on sustainable design.

Because of Lisa’s success in developing AIGA Portland’s sustainability initiatives, she was asked to speak at the national AIGA Leadership Retreat held in Chattanooga this year. At the event, she gave an “inspiration story” presentation on how she founded the initiative, and the progress it’s made over the past two years with the hope of informing other chapters and motivating them to develop similar programs.

Lisa also successfully completed an Agent of Change class sponsored by the Center for Earth Leadership, and she contributed a chapter to The Portland Bottom Line, a book designed to offer advice to small businesses that are trying to become more sustainable. And if all of that wasn’t enough, she contributed two designs to a collection of stories about Portland called Our Portland Story, which was a crowd-sourced book that matched designers with writers. One of her designs was chosen for a gallery show at Backspace in Portland’s Old Town.

John continued his work with the Society of Marketing Professional Services by serving as the Chair of the Education Committee, which is tasked with developing a series of educational events for members of the Portland chapter. He also served as project manager for a six-month American Marketing Association community outreach volunteer project designed to support a local non-profit, which for John was the Bradley Angle domestic violence organization.

On the writing front, John continued his work in screenwriting, winning third place in the screenplay category of the Kay Snow Writing Contest. He also began to experiment with the burgeoning self-publishing phenomenon by self-publishing a collection of poetry called Repairing Shattered Glass, with the cover and inside pages designed by Lisa.

We worked with the Kansas City Area Development Council to design a new advanced energy marketing initiative website — kcadvancedenergy.com. Like most of KCADC’s marketing micro-sites, this one is designed to present the benefits the KC metro can offer businesses. And KCADC’s efforts must be successful, since they were just named one of the top economic development groups in the U.S. by Site Selection magazine.

Another site we just completed was the complete redesign of Kansas City SmartPort’s website. Lisa designed several unique features when building this site, including the use of a translucent window placed above a panoramic photo on the site’s homepage. She also expanded the site’s interactive capabilities with the development of an interactive real estate presentation. In addition to its corporate site, we worked with KC SmartPort to design a new site for one of its industry initiatives: TradeDataExchange.com. This site promotes the development of a data-sharing approach to cargo shipping.

Not all of our work was web-related. We worked with the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute to package and promote its annual dinner and research symposium events. This project included the design of branding, mailers, promotional ads, programs and meeting collateral, event signage, and the publishing of all event information on the web.

In addition to our Kansas City work, we designed a new website for the CDA Academy. This site presents information on the Academy’s classes and curriculum supporting HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and Continuity of Care Document (CCD) training. CDA Academy is a new organization that has been created to serve the needs of the evolving medical records industry.

One additional fun effort was the incorporation of a custom video player into the NextAmericanDream.com website that pulls a customized video playlist from a YouTube channel.

We’ve still got additional work lined up, but it feels good to have completed this much already this year.

We just completed a quick turn-around website project — CDA Academy. CDA Academy is a training organization that brings medical and technical specialists up to speed on the latest developments in CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) and CCD (Continuity of Care Documents). Our design challenge was to create a university-type look and feel that is reflective of the serious technical quality of the subject matter. We also provided a simple ecommerce solution that allows users to register and pay for CDA Academy classes online.

We’ve just begun working with the Hollywood Farmers Market to design and develop their new website. The Hollywood Farmers Market is one of Portland’s vibrant neighborhood farmers markets, which operates on Saturday’s in Northeast Portland just off Sandy Blvd. Our goal is to get this market’s website up and running prior to the start of this year’s market season. The site, which will incorporate a blog, will be built using WordPress tools.

We’re working with long-term clients Kansas City Area Development Council and Kansas City SmartPort to develop and/or refresh a series of websites that promote the Kansas City region’s economic development assets. We’ll have more to say about these sites once they launch later this month.

Content has been solidfied and we’ve reached the design concept stage on a new website for new client Crossroads Christian Church. Also a WordPress site, this one will be a large and fairly complex site that provides extensive capabilities to its users. We should be able to share quite a lot about WordPress site construction techniques once this project is complete.

Outside the web arena, Lisa is finalizing the collateral and signage for the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute’s annual dinner and symposium events.

All this and Lisa is spending a week in Austin at this year’s SXSW Interactive! Life is good!

A challenge with this particular site was how to convey the manner in which Joy works. None of us wanted to resort to using cliched stock photography, most of which fell short of the mark anyway. Illustration seemed to be the best approach. So we brought in Portland illustrator Kim Malek to develop the website visuals.

Lisa, Joy and Kim worked together to create and refine a look that properly conveyed the information and worked effectively in the website layout.

The site is a brief, effective presentation of what clients can expect when they work with Optimal Accords.