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.

For both of us, our earliest inspiration to write and to design came from the beauty and excitement we discovered in printed words and images. In the beginning, it was books. Magazines followed. Life, National Geographic, Esquire, Interview, Emigre, Rolling Stone, Wired, Ray Gun… each publication in its own way a breakthrough to a new way of looking at things – a new way of combining words and graphic design to enhance a message.

The Process Has Evolved || In the days before many contemporary communicators began their professional careers, the printing process required many different types of artists. What used to require writers, graphic designers, typesetters, keyline artists, color separators and printers, now has been reduced by the digital evolution to writer, designer and printer. But it still feels the same way when you hold the finished book.

A project we especially enjoy is the annual report for the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute. We currently are preparing their 2007 report – the fourth we will have produced. The challenge of this report is to capture the energy KCALSI and its shareholder institutions are putting in to the effort to achieve National Cancer Institute status for the Kansas University Medical Center, to translate the discoveries of basic research into healthcare solutions, and to achieve a higher standard of science education for all levels of students.

Newsletters & Brochures Still Work || Regular newsletters, whether online or print, are a good way to keep your name in front of your clients and prospects. But there’s a lot of clutter out there, so we try to design newsletters that engage your readers. In the print world, we have produced stimulating newsletters for a variety of clients across a wide range of industries.

And what company doesn’t use brochures, flyers or other types of print collateral in its marketing efforts? We worked with the Kansas City law firm, Spencer Fane Britt & Browne to design a corporate brochure which drove the branding of all of its print advertising.

Print is All Around You || In everything we do we encounter copywriting and design for print. Business cards, letterhead, menus in restaurants, signs at meetings, backdrops and handouts at exhibits, stickers, postcards, posters… the list just keeps going.

Print is here to stay.