PRISMATIC is a new website for University of Nebraska-Lincoln Advertising Majors. I started on this project almost two years ago. Initially, it was myself and my supervising professor, Stacy James, who picked me out of her class to help with this special project. The first stage of the project was the previous entry, the advertising uncommons.

The second stage involved creating a team to help carry out the objectives I had created for the site. Over the past year we have been working on a visual identity. PRISMATIC was a name I initially chose because advertising is such a colorful business, literally and figuratively. Additionally, the UNL Ad Major is to students as a prism is to light: they enter as one but leave with the skills and knowledge to accomplish many things.

For this, the official logo of the PRISMATIC mission, the prism graphic was originally created by fellow team member Abigail Powers. Typography, graphic placement, and color scheme were my responsibility.

I am also the interactive designer for our website, now in it’s third phase. You can check on the progress of this project at unl-ad.me

The advertising uncommons received a 2009 Nebraska Silver Student ADDY.

The above was the final logo chosen for the Lincoln, NE event Awesome Camp. In short, Awesome Camp brought together Lincoln area creatives, communicators, and entrepreneurs for a day of sharing and networking.

The following were other concepts presented to this client.

I also modified a Wordpress theme for the Awesome Camp website. This can of course be seen at AwesomeCamp.com

I received the Quivira Capital project through a sub-contract with Social Buzz Media. They were helping Quivira Capital learn to use social media for their business. Their current website and logo, however, were in need of an update.

Quivira Capital provides several financial services, and they are based in Lenexa, Kansas.

The name Quivira refers to historic Indian regions in Kansas and was chosen to reflect our Midwestern roots.

Quivira is said to be one of the seven cities of gold that Coronado’s expedition searched for, thus providing even more of a financial tie-in. A request from the client was to include an element that symbolized a river to relate to the region where Quivira was located.

Next, I did a complete overhaul of their website. The following is a comparison of the old and new home page.

Quivira Capital's old home page.

Click to visit the new Quivira Capital.

I kept the look very clean and minimal. The home page has a simple JQuery slider. I used key phrases from their copy, underscored them using the river element from the logo.

The JQuery slider.

The interior “About” and “Services” page are simply informational text pages. The eRoom was created by their own IT.

The "About Us" page.

Click to visit NGC's website.

New Generation Construction Group, inc., contacted me to create a very basic site for their company. The four page site includes two text pages, a project image gallery, and a contact form.

The design process for this site evolved from my originally graphically intense mockups. The final minimalistic site strongly features the brand colors of red and black. There is a defined structure due to strong use of a grid design system.

For the project gallery, I completed resizing and basic brightness/contrast and hue/saturation alterations for their provided images. The gallery uses my favorite lightbox script, Fancybox.

The project gallery lightbox.

I also created a very basic contact form for project inquiries.

The contact form.

Click to visit ChristyNelson.net

Christy Nelson is a craft blogger based in Lincoln, NE. She started blogging on Blogger, but contacted me when she was ready to move to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Christy picked out and purchased the theme VintMint from WP Now which I then modified to better suit her brand image. 99% of the graphic elements of this theme needed to be modified. No Photoshop file was included in the theme package.

This theme did have a nice featured gallery, and was set to post thumbnails and excerpts of recent posts to the home page (seen in the following two images).

The built-in featured posts gallery.

Example recent post excerpt from home page.

Christy hosts sponsored Craft Challenges monthly. Many of the participants are also craft bloggers. She also enjoys featuring neat things that other crafters are making, or cool craft products. I created several badges for those that had been featured on ChristyNelson.net or had won the Craft Challenge.

The page of all ChristyNelson.net web badges

The Craft Challenge packets are distributed through Christy’s Etsy shop. I included the Fancybox JQuery lightbox script so visitors could visit her shop without leaving the page.

Christy's Etsy shop seen through FancyBox lightbox.