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Maria Giudice: You know one of the things about designing a website that
I think came as a surprise to us, but especially a surprise to our clients is
that the brand now is online. It used to be the old days was where you design
the logo and then you design the book and then you design a website.
But now days you start with the website because usually it's the first point in contact
with your customers. And the website really is sort of a centralized meeting point
where all kind of brand communications exist because there is usually
multiple stakeholders are communicating via the website for their company.
So the website oftentimes becomes a transformation for the brand itself.
With start-ups we get to define that experience from the beginning and look at
things more holistically, because we get to do all the touch points. So one
project we are particularly proud of is the Open Architecture Network and
the logo for the Open Architecture Network is based on the golden mean, which is the
law of perfect proportion, which is why it looks like a flag, but it's
actually perfect in its form. Another logo that we did that's a lot of fun
is for one of our start-up companies called Viscape and this is the brain
child of two individuals who wanted to put the fun back into finding vacations.
And so we created this really cool brand identity that has these little
characters, so the website could reload and you could have a new character
on the website and it's just a lot of really fun things that you can do with these
characters. And again in the spirit of fun, we created these background
images that can change as well. So this is the winter theme but there is one
that's waves, there is another one that's purple and the colors are really bright
too, bright and vibrant deliberately to really instill that feeling
of what it feels like to be on vacation. So recently we have been really lucky to get
to do work for cultural institutions. What was really interesting about SFMOMA was
what is modern art in today's world? Is it on the contemporary
end or is it when modern art was born? And that's a fundamental question that is
still in the museum. So we really had to work very closely to try
to find that line what modern art meant to SFMOMA inside the museum and to its visitors.
So we created a really extensible website that really showcased the
artwork with bright bold colors, interesting Flash animations and giving SFMOMA
a very distinct personality. And a site we are currently involved in is
a site that we are designing for Dave Eggers and 826 Valencia. Dave Eggers
is a local writer here in the Bay area but he is internationally known.
And he won the TED Prize, the prestigious TED prize, which is this conference
that happens every year called Technology Entertainment Design, and every
year they give a prize to three extraordinary individuals. They give them
$100,000 and they give him-- and they also give him the ability to ask
for a wish, to put a wish out into the world and hope that somebody or some team
of people can help make that wish come true. So we are working with TED and Dave Eggers
to design this site called Once Upon a School, which allows people to
go there, find opportunities, volunteer opportunities in their area and go in and
volunteer in the public schools and then come back and tell their stories so that
they can inspire others. And we're currently iterating this site to
make it much more fun and inspirational. It's really fun, it's engaging and I am really
excited to see this site go live.