Our Task

To design a site that is beautiful and represents their brand and their mission.  CARES  wanted to boost online donations, gain more advocates, encourage volunteerism, and have an online store all connected to a Content Management System (CMS).

Our Solution

We chose to build their new site on WordPress. This allowed a customizable CMS that moderately web savvy staff could use. It’s easy to use,  open-source, and has plenty of plug-ins for social media. We built their template from the ground up—taking our design, coding the front-end, and hooking it up with the back-end database.One part of our design was a nice, big, colorful “Donate” button to help generate online giving from the site’s visitors. The button links directly with CARES’ Paypal account.

However, getting funding and donations is one thing, but gaining voices to spread the message and getting folks to volunteer is another. To help CARES generate a grassroots effort  we connected the site to their Flickr account and Google calendar.  This allowed them to show off their new photos and keep their advocates in the loop with upcoming events.

Finally, CARES needed the ability to run an online store within their site.  So we beefed up the layout of their store using custom code snippets that have buttons linking directly to Paypal. We educated CARES staff through a series of online classes—led by Stalielife—so they could cut and paste the snippets and edit using WordPress’ basic functions.

The site has an overall robust feel from a simple easy-to-use blogging engine. The site helped sell out a benefit show of The Full Monty and has boosted volunteerism and involvement at all of their recent events.

View the site >

Our first class is Object Design: Sketch and Illustration (Tumblr Blog) and is taught by our friend Craighton Berman of Gravity Tank. It’s a great class on object sketching and ideation. It’s been great to work the brain with some free-form thinking about product design and usability. The class goes beyond that with exercises on communicating your idea through various media and building concept visualization.

You may ask…how will this help your clients? Simply put, by going back to basics…forcing us to breakdown our thought process from an old perspective from our college days — one that isn’t worried about budgets, billable time and deadlines. Taking a back-to-basics approach helps to gather ideas in a loose thought environment and will spawn new solutions or designs for our clients.

With just 3 weeks under the belt, I can tell this is going to help bring new insights to all of the future Stalelife projects. Check out some sketches and work from the first few classes.

Some notes and sketches from class.

Developing muscle memory for circle drawing.

Exercise with objects in 2-point perspective.

Around 240,000 people will benefit from the most recent Annual Appeal from World Bicycle Relief. If you don’t know them, WBR is a smart and well-run non-profit that provides sustainable transportation to help people go farther, carry more and cut their travel time considerably.

You can see our full case study here.

A lot of hard work and strategy went into this endeavor – a true team effort between Stalelife and the Communications and Development groups at WBR. Our approach was integrated with old and new tactics, and the results will make us stronger for years to come.

In the end, we surpassed initial goals by 25%, raised the total donation amount and nearly doubled the amount of advocates on the WBR lists. But most important, we helped the group that helps so many. And that feels good.

This year we’ve lent our support and design prowess to the Midwest Independent Film Festival, a year long fest that runs on the first Tuesday of every month in Chicago.

Help us decide – which awards poster do you like the best?

We’ve created three concepts for the annual “Best of the Midwest Awards” and we’d like your opinion. Please read our rationale and give us your thoughts to help pick a winner.

Creative input:
Design a branded poster that exudes a “sharp, high-end, classy, for everyone” feel. Be sure to keep the film community in mind when designing.

Concept One

Dark and sleek, it plays off of the modern touches of legendary designer Saul Bass. The bright colors juxtapose the black background and pop off the page grabbing your attention. The stark white imagery shows the foundation of indie film – the old 8mm camera. While a classic Zippo top shows that these films are ‘hot’ and cutting edge.

Concept One

Concept Two

This poster an abstract heart is comprised of overlayed translucent cutouts of the states that make up the Midwest. After all, the Midwest is the heartland of our country. The clean white background harkens back to modern/minimalistic artwork form the 70’s & 80’s.

Concept Two

Concept Three

Our good friend Brian has knuckle tattoos that read ‘hold fast’ and it made us think about the dedication required for his permanent belief. Midwestern artists strongly believe the middle of the country is one of the best places to find emerging artists. So poster three showcases the strong love of the Midwest in a simple illustration accentuated with graffiti graphics.

Concept Three

So which one do you like?

What’s your favorite and why?

If you are in Chicago, check out the Midwest Independent Film Fest on the first Tuesday of every month at the Landmark Century Cinema. Amazing films and a good place to see film from artists before they get famous.

The biggest requirement was the ability to modify the website in a second’s notice, so we recommended a super blog, if you will. It has multiple URLs landing into one design, with three tabbed sections and 14 subpages.

It’s complex and the taxonomy was a great challenge to figure out with the group that is still trying to figure out everything that they do. Seems like Andrew Stackhouse, bike promoter extraordinaire, is always coming up with new ideas for cycling races in central ATX.

In the past Andrew’s team has posted lengthy reviews and notices, so we used a white content channel to ensure readability was kept to high level. The black border provides a nice contrast and also helps Glennon Simmons photos pop more on the page (he’s got a great eye, that guy).

Head out to the Dirt Derby – you’ll see us in our Stalelife kits every Tuesday. And at the Lone Star Cyclocross events, too.

While attempting to park in a garage sixth street, we couldn’t help but talk about poor signage design. Probably because the Stalelife-mobile (hybrid, naturally) was all over the place.

“Why must we search for tiny signs that don’t appear until the last minute?”
“Why are they all the same color?”

Seems like the folks running Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia thought the same thing, because they hired actual artists to create their signage. True, trained professionals who put together the most incredible design of parking garage signage known to man. They look distorted now, but when driving and approaching them they are completely legible. The design even won an award, and I like to think that’s because the design is founded in smart.

Can you think of other places that could benefit from smart environmental design? The Chicago “EL” system is one…