I can’t talk about this project without talking about the person behind the project. I met Beverly Compton over three years ago through my work with the Southwest Land Alliance. Since then, she’s volunteered for my projects as I have hers. She even helped me have one of the most awesome summer jobs I’ve had in a long time when I worked with her at Pagosa Feed & Nursery.
Beverly’s asked me to help with web projects before, and for one reason or another the timing doesn’t always work out for the depth of work requested. I know I can always say no. And she knows she can always tell me that the project has found another avenue.
The timing was just right for me to spend my *Stay-cation slapping together a classic TwentyEleven theme packed with content and links which Beverly did a fantastic job of gathering.
*Stay-cation: While a storm moved through in October, we holed up in the house with the dogs for almost a week without ‘work’ obligations. Then Hubby and I took off a night to spend his birthday in Taos, NM.
Because they usually travel in groups, they were the perfect featured image for the Weminuche CBC website.
This summer, I was asked to put together a modest For Sale By Owner website. We saved a huge amount of time and effort when Pagosa SUN’s Mike Pierce had produced an ad for the upcoming Relocation guide. His ad became the basis of the site design.
The site features a rotating slideshow and Google Earth maps to pinpoint the property.
With the launch of SubalpineDesign.com a few new and exciting projects have crossed my path. One was for a friend, talented artist and cellist Mark Dudrow’s new CD with guitarist and fiddler Justin Dean. This was one of my first professionally printed pieces in a LONG time. They came to me with the overall design, but I had to tweak it to fit the template and got to make some additional design and typography suggestions. See you at the CD release party January 30th at the Taos Inn!
I also had the opportunity to offer design solutions for a new company starting here in Pagosa, Little Weedz. It’s a line of cute clothing tailored to grow with the child. Whenever I have a project, I strive to present at least three very different design concepts to my client. This stretches my imagination and allows for several options to recombine and modify. Click on an image below to see some of the suggestions that were offered to Little Weedz and a sneak peek at the final concept which should launch within the next month:
Inspired by the fabrics used to create Little Weedz dresses. Also inspired by the Little Weedz fabrics and the idea of using these fabrics to create a quilt.Inspired by the Little Weedz logo and the thought of this website as a garden community.The final design incorporated elements from all of the proposed ideas as well as a few new ones inspired by Little Weedz’s business cards.
I also was asked to create the functioning menu I envisioned. I had to change up a few of my strategies for the rollover images and needed a suggestion on how to use PHP to change the bee’s position to correspond with your current page.
I believe a designer’s portfolio should be reviewed and updated regularly to be sure it showcases their best work in the most succinct way possible. With the power of the web, a designer no longer has to tailor their portfolio in this fashion. I have still chosen to show my best and most relevant work in the portfolio section of my website, but in this blog section I can talk about ALL of my work. I think it’s a good way to reflect on how my skills have evolved.
I thought the first ‘project’ I should showcase in this fashion, should be some of my works from my time at Parelli. I worked for Parelli from 2002-2007. These designs end around 2005 when I took on more of a project manager role and did less designing. I do not include them in my current portfolio as there are few of the pieces that I feel are my best work; there was often so much content I wished we could have made the designs simpler; there were tons of projects with tight deadlines so not everything got the attention it deserved; and we worked collaboratively so there are few things I can take 100% credit for.
As I assembled these pieces to scan them, there were a few things I reflected upon:
I can see an evolution of my skills as well as the evolution of the company’s content/message/professionalism.
I remember now how ‘color-centric’ most of our designs were. We color coded everything.
There are a few designer tricks that I chuckled to myself about. I’ll point some of these out when I discuss the individual designs.
The real star–what made our designs stand out from the competitors–was the hundreds of photos we had at our fingertips from our talented photographer, Coco.
From VHS to DVD
I spent a lot of time at the beginning just learning what the company was all about and learning more about design in general. These VHS jackets, published in 2002, were some of the first projects I worked on. How they contrast against the DVD jacket that was part of the national ad campaign that we won an award for in 2005!
2003 Rocky Mountain Horse Expo
In 2003 Parelli supplied the headliners for this well known, regional horse expo held in Denver. Likewise, we designed the graphics for posters and tickets.
Newsletters
Until 2003, Parelli produced a quarterly newsletter for anyone on its mailing list. As we transitioned to a web-based newsletter, we prepared our subscribers by postcard. This transitioned to a weekly e-newsletter which was one of my first projects using html. Not knowing much code at the time, I relied on Dreamweaver to format E-News which was sent to our database as well as posted on our website.
On Tour
A large portion of our marketing was focused on promoting Pat & Linda’s tour around the US, mostly by using national and regional advertising and direct mail pieces. These are examples of some of the postcards we designed to promote the tour.
2004 Catalog
If there’s one piece of work I feel I can claim as my own and am most proud of from my time at Parelli, it is this catalog.
2005 Conference Program
The annual Conference at the Parelli ranch in Colorado was often the launching pad for new innovations and were well attended. The 2005 Conference was one of the first where the schedule was finalized enough in advance that we could play with the content and present it in a souvenir style program.
Happy Holidays
As mentioned in my post about The Logo, it was while taking photos for a Christmas mailer that I shot the picture for my logo. While I no longer have a copy of the artwork we used for the first mailer, I do have the ones from 2004 and 2005.
