The Design Musings of Robby Fowler

Sharpcon Construction contacted RFDesign to see if we could come up with their identity. Although they’re a new company, they are NOT new to the construction industry and general contracting. Like many of our clients, they needed something “fast” because they already have bids and projects to win. So we gave them good and fast…all for the same price. Click the logo above to see the identity pieces (business card, letterhead, envelope).

RFDesign was contracted by Erickson-Hall Construction to revise their brand and initiate a new communication approach. With the economy weakening, Erickson-Hall realized the value in distinguishing themselves from other construction firms in Southern California. In a day where simply winning the “lowest bid” projects cannot sustain you, RFDesign has stepped in to help them leverage what was already there, but hiding in the corner. EH is known predominantly for their excellent reputation and attention to people over projects. So we brought their identity up to date and created some marketing pull sheets that highlight their excellent reputation and emphasis on relationships. Gone are the boring details about square footage and materials. Those are now incorporated into a new strategy that emphasizes what challenges EH helped their cleint overcome, and how appreciative their clients are of their work and reputation. It’s a personal touch that gets beyond buildings to the people that work on them together. Click on the image above to see the comps and final pull sheet and brand (last image).

Check out some recent pics from a project RFDesign recently completed for Fellowship Jonesboro. They asked RFDesign to capture their mission trip to their own city. Click on the pic above, then click on the right of any pic to advance the show, or the left side of the pic to go back. Needless to say, our client was very pleased with what we captured with “the glass.”

Based on previous work RFDesign has done for EricksonHall Construction Company, they have chosen RFDesign to help them update their brand. In these tougher economic times, EH realized that building trust with their current and potential clients is a must. One major step in that direction is updating their brand to more effectively communicate how trusted they are in the business, and what a wonderful and distinctive benefit that is for their clients. We’ll be working with them to develop pull sheet templates, a new corporate brochurch, updated logo, and completely rehauled web site to include powerful and easy content management. We’ve already begun the groundwork on the logo updates and pull sheets. We’ll be posting work here soon.

We recently completed our “django” project and our client is quite pleased with the solution. Now, estimators that work for the client can simply go to an admin interface and quickly add new projects and descriptions. Then a central “Projects” page gets updated on the fly to reflect newly added projects. Secondly, creating a new project also creates a “Projects Details” page associated with each project. So after creating the project via the admin, the client simply FTPs large numbers of files and folders to their server. The “Project Details” page for that project then reflects all of those files and folders. The result is that subcontractors who are interested in bidding on a project can always go to one central location, find the project they are interested in bidding on, click on the project and access all of the plans and details they need to quickly and easily submit a bid to our client. Django, that’s good. Click the pic above to see a screenshot of the admin interface, the project overview page, and the project detail page.

We’re in the middle of building our first django (http://www.djangoproject.com/) project for our client EricksonHall Construction. They needed a quick, simple, and manageable way to use the web to share with their list of contractors files necessary for them to bid on upcoming projects. Internally, EricksonHall wanted a simple solution where, with a few clicks, a project gets added to a master “project bids” page. For their contractors, they wanted one simple place where they could go online, select a project to bid on, and then have all of the files and information necessary to submit a bid. The idea is to keep EricksonHall quick and nimble when it comes to bidding on projects, while at the same time simplifying their communication with their subcontractors bidding on specific portions of the overall project. So far, so good. We’ll let you know how it turns out. We’re almost done!

Bible Fellowship gave us a holler to help them create an identity to match the name change of their youth ministry—Axis. They also needed a shirt designed that incorporated the new identity. And they needed it quick…like “before they went to camp” quick. So here’s what we came up with. Click on the graphic above to see the shirt design with the new identity.

Ventana is at it again. As a ministry that seeks to gain the attention of high school seniors before they head straight to college or out in the workplace, now is a critical time to remind graduating seniors that Ventana is a great choice this fall. So RFdesign created a series of postcard mailers that will be hitting mailboxes soon. The goal is have a focused marketing effort that gets Ventana’s name and message in front of seniors with a series of mailers. Click on the sample above to see what we came up with for this critical campaign.

After many a design project, it’s seems only natural that one would fall in love with great photography. So after reading a few books and grabbing my entry-level DSLR, I’m finally starting (note, I said “starting”) to understand what I’m doing (or at times NOT doing). So I figured I’d post a few recent pics for your perusal. Just click on the picture above to cycle through some recent shots.

Ventana Ministries tapped RF Design again, this time to create a quarterly newsletter. The first installment was just in time for the Christmas holidays. RF Design worked hard to keep the same brand we’ve already established for Ventana, capturing the “Baja” flavor of their ministry geared towards graduating high school seniors. The image above gives you an example of what we created. Click on the graphic to see the full four-page spread.