Heading Into the Stretch
We're a Fan of Fan Benno-Caris
Sometimes the line gets crossed… by that I mean that sometimes I cross the line… from client to friend. And then to supporter.
Our latest client is 91-year-old Fan
Benno-Caris. You may have seen her on CNN or major local TV and
radio news programs, as well as the Dallas Morning News and its
website. Fan is running "the biggest race of my life," she says.
That race is for a place on the Addison City Council.
PentaGRAFX has created the website and all the campaign collateral
material for the Addison For Fan campaign.
But Fan isn't new to competition. She's a world-record-holding,
world champion racewalker. More importantly, Fan is a person who
knows what she wants in life and goes after it. She has a vision
for herself, sets goals, and sets her shoulder to the wheel and
does the work to achieve those goals.
Fan Benno-Caris is my hero. And although I cannot vote for her
because I live in Dallas (we should talk to Addison Mayor Joe Chow
about that) I heartily support her in her Addison For Fan
campaign for a place on the city council.
While small and petite, Fan's stature and sweet demeanor might lead
one to be dismissive. But one does so at one's peril. She has some
strong views on a variety of issues facing Addison — and all
cities — as the global financial crisis becomes more and more
localized. And she will be heard.
Keep an eye on Fan Benno-Caris. She's the leading edge of a
movement in this country, a movement by folks with
experience in a wide variety of areas who are not content simply to
rock away their sunset years on the front porch while sipping on a
lemonade. They've seen the mistakes of the past and want to step
forward to help us avoid repeating those blunders. Or, at least, to
help us prepare to weather the storm.
If you live in Addison, Texas, I enthusiastically encourage you to
seek out Fan Benno-Caris, learn more about the issues, and vote for
her on May 9th.
New Website for HiddenGoddess.com
Our client, Candice White, a brilliant portrait photographer, is expanding her business to include boudoir photography. After receiving over 100,000 hits on her portraiture website, we discovered that her boudoir pages were receiving more hits than any other category. Since her main business is family and child portraiture, we thought this was information worth acting on.
Turns out that even after factoring out undesirable traffic, the
number of hits on her boudoir photography page was substantial. We
began by discussing a theme for the site. Ms. White has a strong
love of theatricality in her photography, so we decided to use a
theater-look as a springboard for designing the site.
What does a theater have? Curtains. Great big, sensual, velvety
curtains. What didn’t we have at our disposal? You got it.
But the next best thing was using lots of imagination and a bit of
Photoshop to create our own curtains.
Fortunately, Candice happened to have a red dress made of a very
“red curtainy” material. We steamed it a bit to remove
some wrinkles and hung it on a garment rack as you can see below.
We locked down the camera and shot several frames in succession,
each time moving the dress down a bit and rotating it so that the
folds fell differently for each shot. This gave us a
natural-looking lighting setup — slightly hot on one side and
falling off to the right.
It took some manipulation in Photoshop
to get the “curtain” to be reasonably even at the
bottom from stage right to stage left. Once completed, we copied
the curtain’s several layers into a new single layer and made
a layer mask out of its shape, then unlinked the mask. We used
Motion Blur to get rid of all the wrinkles, once and for all, and
blended the new, blurred curtain with the curtain layers below
using Overlay. This gave a sheen and a snap to the curtain that the
original lacked.
Touching up a few minor flaws, we then had our curtain. We added a
valance and a stage and we were in “show
bidness!”
Our Newest Website
We just finished a new website for our client, Southland Safety. They’re an industrial safety company with clients in Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, Chemical Manufacturing, Construction, & DOT Operator Qualification.
The site was three times larger than
originally planned and we accomplished everything we set out to do
at the start; improvising, adapting, and overcoming all the
obstacles we met along the way.
WindoDressing.com Goes Live
Our newest client, WindoDressing™, a home improvement company in East Texas specializing in window treatments and kitchen and bath design, just turned on the switch for their new website. Business is very good and they have high hopes to create a touchpoint for customers both to see their products and to be able to contact the company for their products and services.
Future plans include a blog and a Before/After photo album to show off their work.
If you live in East Texas, visit their
site and look over their line of products. They're good people and
do excellent work.
☆
Lots of projects going on here at PentaGRAFX. Stay tuned for more
news.
Playing Catchup on the News
Things have been hopping around PentaGRAFX for the past few months, leaving things like updates to our Latest News blog to pile up on the corner of our desk. This is a problem that is more welcome than not.
3-in-1 Product Brochure
With that said, one of the recent print projects we've done was a bit of a challenge — the new piece, a 12-page brochure + cover for DiamondTouch, Inc. It incorporated a pocket inside the back cover to contain letterhead, a CD, and a business card. The challenge was bringing together 3 previous pieces: a presentation folder, 10 (+ 2 new) sell sheets, and a 4-page brochure into a single brochure. We also were asked to mimic the color scheme of the company's trade show booth while keeping the overall look of the piece consistent with previous collateral, which had a clean, open look.It was a fun project and the piece benefited from the terrific product photography of Marty Perlman here in Dallas.
Bottom line — the client, Tom Bronson, president of DiamondTouch loved it! He even printed more than he has in the past and his very excited resellers couldn't wait to get their hands on them.
Website Design
At PentaGRAFX, we're constantly reaching, growing and stretching to acquire skills, hire people, and create relationships that help us to serve our present and future clients. For almost 20 years, we've been primarily a print-oriented design firm. And, although print isn't going away anytime soon, the market has changed and the rate of change is accelerating. That's why we're now offering web design and search engine optimization for our clients.Our newest web client is Candice White, a brilliant fine art and portrait photographer based here in Dallas. She knows precisely what she wants and demands nothing less than our best effort.
We stepped up to the task and produced a website that we're very proud of for its beauty, simplicity, and ease-of-use. With over 200 images in her online portfolio, it became clear that staying organized would be a chore. But once in the groove, things went very smoothly.
Simple, elegant, and scaleable. . . that's why the client said, "IT
IS BEAUTIFUL! I'm very pleased."
Along the way, we redesigned her company logo and incorporated it
into the site. Two versions are shown here.
☆
That's it for now. More to come soon. Keep those cards and letters
coming. . . er, make that, IMs and emails.
New Campaign for DiamondTouch
PentaGRAFX just completed the opening salvoes in a new marketing and ad campaign for DiamondTouch. DiamondTouch is a software company that provides POS systems to a very narrow niche market — pizza delivery restaurants.
This is a new direction for DiamondTouch and aims to help with differentiation from their competitors; rather than talking about product features, in the new campaign, we emphasized the main reasons DiamondTouch's customers buy their product and remain so loyal — 1. The people at DiamondTouch; 2. Ease of use; and 3. Direct benefits to the bottom line.
We just finished a final piece of
collateral for DiamondTouch as they head off to Las Vegas to a
pizza trade show. Armed with a new booth design, new ad, and new
collateral, they're sure to come home with tons of leads that will
help them solidify their lead in the pizza POS space.