Canton Symphony Orchestra 2023/2024 Season Materials

Canton Symphony Orchestra reached out to us again to begin building materials for the 2023-2024 season. We've been working with them for years, so they asked us to handle their 2023-2024 season postcards, season brochure, and program book.

Their season is divided into 2 main sections, Masterworks and Pops, where there are 7 concerts and 4 concerts, respectively. Each of these needed a 4x6 custom designed postcard with the event's title and information. In addition to the 4x6, it was also necessary to include 4 additional sizes of each card to be used in other marketing efforts such as social media. Crucial to this set of postcards was a unifying feel in the design, so we selected a similar art style and a unifying bar on the bottom of the graphics for all ticketing information.

In addition to the original 4x6 Design, CSO requested multiple sizes of these cards in different dimensions for use on their website and social media. In total, we designed 55 cards.

Another major part of the CSO Season material is their brochure, which has frequently asked questions as well as general information about the overall season. This large brochure unfolds unto a 16-panel sheet, with 8 panels on each side. We designed this using a bright color palette with similar colors used in the cards, and a similar font to that used on the cards. We selected our title font to used Montserrat, with Playfair Display being our accent font. This combination allowed us to achieve a bold, punchy feel while maintaining the subtle, classy qualities that the previous season design had.

Finally, the season program book is meant to be a glimpse into everything going on at CSO for the season, from messages from staff as well as detailed biographies about every piece being played in their masterworks concerts, this is meant to be essentially a condensed version of their website all in a 100-page zine.

We maintained the color palette and font selection when it came time to update their website design. Building on the design we had already done last year, we updated their font selection to our new fonts, inverted the dark theme to a white theme, and swapped out their purple and subtle blues for our brightly inspired color palette. To tie it all together, we made use of a subtle paper texture that was used on all the season cards to make it feel cohesive.

Canton Symphony Orchestra's 2022-23 Season Website Design

We've been hard at work over the past couple months, hustling to put together a brand new website brand for the Canton Symphony Orchestra. CSO approached me about creating some new website design for them as they entered into their new season. So, we got to work! We focused here on creating a new header, footer, and homepage, while leaving much of the rest of the site the same.

First, let's take a look at what the old site looked like and identify what problems they wanted to solve. Previously, the header was extremely large and took up way too much space. Sometimes, this was up to half of the screen on desktop devices and more than a full screen on mobile devices! This made it extremely difficult to properly utilize the site due to the large amount of scrolling necessary. Their logo took up a significant portion of the header, leaving massive amounts of white space around it. In addition, they had a very large menu that was always showing. All these different features combined created the intensely large menu. Their footer was no different. The logos of their sponsors took up an extremely large amount of screen real-estate, meaning the user has to do a lot of scrolling to see them. By downsizing everything, we could make the site more usable and friendly. Also, by hiding away some of the less immediately needed information, such as the mega menu, we could do even better. So, we got to work.

The first step in developing the website was to sit down and identify the core tenants of what we were looking for. We talked about the priorities of what needed to be on the site, what style they were going for, and what features they could utilize. We began numbering the elements on their previous page in terms of priority, starting at 1 for most important and going downwards from their. This is a good exercise to determine where things need to be visually placed on the site to make things effective. If you have things that aren't important, they shouldn't be taking up significant amounts of real-estate. So the exercise can tell us where we need to draw the line. For CSO, the important things were the 4 buttons they originally had in their header, as well as their logo, which needed to remain large enough to read. Stylistically, their 2022-2023 brochure had a very 'Art Deco' theme and they wanted the website to have a similar feel. This lead us to using a combination of a serif font for headers and a sans-serif font for non-headers. We made use of a lot of thin bordering and dark colors to make a very high-contrast look that exhumes some of the same feel of the brochure. With our look decided, it came time to develop.

Their site was currently built using Elementor, which is not typically what we build our websites with. However, they specifically requested that we stick with Elementor as much as we can, so we went ahead and began creating everything within Elementor. This includes the Mega Menu, fly-out javascript and more, all done natively.

There was one last piece that they wanted us to do. That was a loading screen that utilized a short animation that we had made for them in a video we did in the past. They thought it would be great to see this animation upon visiting the site. So, I converted the animation to a GIF and added a small WordPress Plugin to allow that animation to play on the load of the site!

Overall, we're extremely proud of what we were able to do for the Canton Symphony Orchestra here, and we're excited for them to head into their brand new season. Especially with a fresh new look to go with it.

Great Lakes Wealth Management - Branding Refresh

Great Lakes Wealth Management, owned and run by Wayne Maslyk in Sandusky, Ohio, has been around for multiple decades, helping people prepare for retirement, as well as helping retirees manage their retirements. When it came time to renew his old logo, he knew that he wanted to keep a similar, iconic lakeside feel, and more so just refresh it. So we approached it with the idea that it was not a total re-design of the logo, but instead just an adjustment. First thing we had to do was re-make the old logo, as it hadn't been updated in years, so all we had to work on was a couple of low-quality images of it. We re-created the old logo from those images, and then worked to soften the edges and make it feel a little smoother. We then picked out a brand new color palette that we based off of his old one, paring a beautiful yellow and blue that go great with white. We finished it off with a new font pairing, and a variety of layout options. This new logo has been in use all over the area on local TV stations and in local magazines and flyers. What an awesome little project!