Projects Archive · Page 3 of 4 · Kari Kay | Product Design Meets Brand Strategy

Lean Design for Startups

A startup for startups, Lean Design teaches entrepreneurs the importance of clarifying their message from day one and using their limited resources to their full potential.

SERVICES
Product Validation, Branding, Identity, Website Design, Copywriting, Printed and Digital Marketing Collateral

PROJECT TYPE
Branding, Visual Identity Design, Website Design, Marketing Collateral, Educational Course Design

Lean Design for Startups is one of our Founder's favorite pet projects. After helping dozens of startups launch and iterate on their products, Kari saw how a lack of understanding about the creative process was costing entrepreneurs precious time and unnecessary heartache.

Kari developed the Lean Design™ brand and wrote, designed and organized the educational content from scratch. She is continually developing new materials to help entrepreneurs design their businesses and products to fit their lifestyle, personality and talents.

This growing collection of educational content is both an exercise in "eating your own dog food" as well as a service to ambitious tech-savvy entrepreneurs. Boiling down over a decade of branding and design expertise into bite-size exercises for the design-challenged has been an incredible experience that has strengthened Kari's love for the design process and its ability to serve people in practical and often life-changing ways.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

Chalkdoc: Web App

Little Green Light

Roland Foods

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Bob’s Floor Covering

Bob's Floor Covering

Interaction Design

Visual Design

Role
Creative Director, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer

Scope of Work
Brand Positioning, Website Design, User Onboarding Experience

A 30-year-old, high-end flooring company elevates everyday environments with their expert guidance and exclusive, curated product lines.

Bob's Floor Covering is an unassuming business in a small, unassuming town in Southern Wisconsin. But, like many companies, there's much more to Bob's than meets the eye. Through the process of modernizing their website, we learned that when the real estate market tanked in '08, Bob Jr. saw the opportunity to grow as a high-end flooring company, adding exclusive lines to his already extensive collection. This move set him apart from his competitors, not only as having the largest showroom in the area, but also as a name affiliated with good taste and high quality for the wealthy homeowners throughout the Chicago and Milwaukee area.

We used the website redesign process to more clearly position their company, constructing sections of content intended to draw in ideal customers and partners. We also enabled their non-technical staff to manage content and estimate requests seamlessly and without fear of losing content or being vulnerable to security breaches. Their online presence finally reflected their company's broad and deep expertise, and their respected relationships with local builders.

Untouched for eight years, their website didn't just need a visual upgrade, it needed to become a better business tool. We rebuilt the site from nothing, rewriting entirely new content with SEO in mind, hiring a photographer to show off the top brands in their vast showroom, and creating a faster, easier way to provide customers with custom estimates.

The day we launched the website, the first quote request arrived in their queue. The owner and office assistant were both instantly notified via email, and able to see their prospect's floor plans, measurements and request in one organized list. Before, this would have required multiple back-and-forth phone calls. Now, it was as easy as checking their email.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

A growing, down-to-earth legal team helps innovative companies protect their assets and maintain sanity in the rocky world of business.

SERVICES
Visual Identity Refresh, Digital Marketing Collateral

PROJECT TYPE
Visual Identity, Brand Extension

After a brief conversation with a member of the OgdenGlazer team, you know you can look forward to straightforward, "plain English" answers to even your most complicated legal questions. With a focus on the technology and food & beverage industries, this growing legal team understands the creative effort and sacrifice required to make these companies profitable. They take time to know their clients and guide them through protecting their intellectual property from day one.

Wanting to retain their existing logomark as much as possible, we worked together to fine-tune their eclectic image and extend their identity into a responsive website, business cards and presentation templates.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

Chalkdoc: Web App

Little Green Light

Roland Foods

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Logos

Logo Collection 1

2013-2016

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Shiftboard

As a rapidly growing cloud-based workforce management software and employee scheduling solution, Shiftboard needed a facelift for their website and presentations.

SERVICES
Website Design, Graphic Design

PROJECT TYPE
Visual Identity Refresh, Website Design, Collateral Design

Shiftboard serves a wide range of industries throughout the United States and United Kingdom. They sought to refine their image to stand out from their more established competitors. Time was of the essence, so we made simple tweaks to their visual identity and completely revamped their website, making it more responsive, functional and attractive to prospects. We worked with their in-house marketing team to maintain their SEO and clarify content.

To flesh out their image, we extended their identity to include photo treatments, a bold color palette, custom icons, page layouts and type treatments for their responsive website and PowerPoint presentation templates.

Not wanting to noticeably transform their image, which was growing in recognition, we made minor alterations to their logo's letter spacing to improve its readability and polish, and toned down their very orange primary color to a more palatable reddish orange.

We tweaked their primary brand colors and expanded their palette to provide more range and establish a modern image.

We simplified their pricing tables to showcase options more clearly, and developed toggle functionality to view monthly and annual pricing.

We developed functionality to make their vast number of case studies filterable by industry.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

Chalkdoc: Web App

Little Green Light

Roland Foods

… Back to Portfolio …

Chalkdoc: Web App

ChalkDoc

Role
Lead Product Designer

Scope of Work
User Research, Launch MVP, Visual Identity, Marketing Website, Web App, Illustration

ChalkDoc was created by a teacher who was disenchanted by the canned lesson-planning tools on the market. He decided to build tools that both students and teachers can enjoy.

Duration: 8 weeks, Completed in 2015

Opportunity: ChalkDoc's founder wanted to create a completely customizable lesson-planning app to accommodate teachers' tiny budgets and limited time. The tool features simple, streamlined functionality and access to relevant and entertaining questions to engage students' hearts and minds. While other apps generate non-editable worksheets, ChalkDoc gives teachers control over the specific kinds of problems they know their students need to work on most.

Approach: My work with ChalkDoc started with brand and product positioning through market research and user surveys. I connected the founder with an engineering team, and developed a simple visual identity as a foundation for a consistent look and feel to extend across their responsive marketing website, worksheets and web app as they experimented and scaled its functionality. I provided illustrated assets, a mini design system for the web app, high-fidelity wireframes, and templates for the downloadable worksheets.

Outcome: Using the provided assets and foundational user flows, the ChalkDoc team was able to scale the product across multiple iterations without requiring additional design work. The software continues to provide value for thousands of users many years later.

User Flow: Creating a Worksheet

Create Worksheet Flow - Iteration 1

Since the final output was intended to be a printable worksheet, the interface was designed to provide a preview of the worksheet as the user added their desired content. The worksheet title, page numbers, and a space for students to write their name and date, were auto-generated to keep things organized.

1. Create New Worksheet

2. Add New Section

ChalkDoc_New Worksheet Edit Section Simple Configure

3. Configure Section - Advanced Options

4. Worksheet Preview (hover to scroll)

Create Worksheet Flow - Iteration 2

After reviewing and testing different options, the engineers suggested some simplifications to reduce the lift. Displaying "pages" in the preview proved to be more complex than it was worth due to the varying lengths of questions that filled an unpredictable amount of the page. Additionally, rather than printing directly from the app, teachers were offered the option to "download" the worksheet and the answer key separately, and share the worksheet via email.

While keeping it simple was the number one priority in their early days, I made sure to bring out the approachable charm of the brand through custom illustrations and playful copywriting.

I built a marketing website for the founder to edit as needed, establishing a simple design system, and providing a series of illustrated assets to flesh out the look for the website and within the app itself.

The Final Product

After conceiving of the initial flows, and handing off the wireframes and mini design system, the founder and engineers continued to evolve the platform over time to include an increasingly complex library of swappable equations.

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Digital Alchemy

UI Design

UX Design

Role
Lead Product Designer

Scope of Work
User Research, iOS App Design, Prototyping, UX Design, UI Design, Visual Design, Interaction Design

Digital Alchemy uses the power of mobile technology to connect house hunters and homeowners with financial professionals. Polish the UX/UI for bank loan iOS app

Opportunity. Digital Alchemy is a white label financial product for real estate brokers and agents. It non-intrusively guides home owners and house hunters through each stage of the home financing process with in-depth information uncommonly found in tools for mass markets.

Approach. We worked with Digital Alchemy to create a sleek visual identity, with matching collateral and a white label app customized for each financial institution.

Outcome. The mark, formed by two sets of rising bars, create an "A" for Alchemy. Given the name, gold was an obvious choice for their primary brand color; it's contrasted nicely with a stately navy blue to give the brand a confident, professional foundation.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

Chalkdoc: Web App

Little Green Light

Roland Foods

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Little Green Light

A cloud-based donor management platform provides nonprofits with simple, approachable tech tools to maximize fundraising efforts.

SERVICES
Brand Strategy, Visual Identity Design Refresh, Website Design, Copywriting, Design, Illustration

PROJECT TYPE
Brand Refresh, Brand Expansion, Website Design, Marketing Collateral

After ten years in business, Little Green Light had gained outstanding recognition in the nonprofit world. To accelerate signups, they decided it was time to enlist outside help to express their fun personality and consolidate their message.

Working in-depth with the executive team, we pulled together their values and individual personalities into a simple, potent identity. We paid special attention to the user experience on their website to guide visitors through the product features and benefits, and removing obstacles to encourage user sign-ups.

We expanded their new identity across a variety of marketing collateral, including a custom responsive WordPress website, complete with humorous illustrations and eye-catching animations, as well as digital and printed collateral, including trade show exhibits, one sheets and online ads.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

Chalkdoc: Web App

Little Green Light

Roland Foods

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Digsite

A unique social platform makes it possible for corporations of all sizes to run affordable user validation tests in a fraction of the time of traditional focus groups.

SERVICES
Collateral Design, Illustration

PROJECT TYPE
Brand Expansion

Building off their existing logo and color palette, we helped Digsite polish and expand their visual identity into Keynote presentation templates, marketing collateral and custom icons and illustrations.

We illustrated custom icons that could be used in a variety of formats for their printed and digital collateral.

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OgdenGlazer Legal

Chalkdoc: Web App

Little Green Light

Roland Foods

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Seattle in Progress Website

Seattle in Progress tracks construction projects throughout Seattle, giving local residents and businesses a way to stay informed at each step of the process right from their phones.

SERVICES
Visual Identity Design Refresh, Responsive Website Design

PROJECT TYPE
Brand Expansion, Website Design

Seattle is one of the most rapidly growing cities in America. Construction projects have become a normal part of everyday conversation, and with that, the desire to know what's being built downtown, down the street, or even right next door. Beyond providing information to satisfy curiosities, Seattle in Progress can also notify users of new projects, giving naysayers the chance to appeal for changes to construction plans that might create unfair or unappealing living situations.

We worked with them to revamp their marketing website, improve the user experience design for the responsive web app, and extend it as a white label solution for businesses. They were able to double their business as a result.

Seattle in Progress App

See the work we did for the Seattle in Progress app interface.

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