You know the moment in the pop culture cinema classic where the girl with glasses descends onto the dance floor under the collective gaze of her once-inattentive classmates – and she’s radiant?

Yeah. That’s us. Now.

Over the past six months we’ve crafted over 5,000 graphic elements, amassed over 1,000 original images, and written over 10,000 lines of code in support of this moment – welcome to the new online space for Urban Influence.

Rebranding the brand for branding

Our brand revival began with an audit of the Urban Influence identity; an earnest, full-force assessment of our visuals and verse – how we are represented in digital and print mediums, and more so, how we want to be received.

And while this appraisal process is one performed by our team time and time again, commencing a brand audit for a company in which you are embedded presents some interesting challenges and exciting opportunities.

We knew entering the effort we wanted to provide viewers a portfolio-centric experience showcasing the breadth and depth of UI client work. With over a decade under our belt, it’s a lot of content. And in an industry where you are what you do, demonstrating the ‘do’ was necessary to clarify the Urban Influence brand and client product.

Design + display

The team wanted to maintain an aesthetic that reflected our personality, while still highlighting client work. We paired reserved, poignant project visuals with a robust voice to convey the dynamism of our team through descriptions of the UI branding process.

Moving away from a broad collection of colors and typographic options to further complement client work, we employed cool neutrals and a clean triad of fonts that work as well in print as they do on the web.

And speaking of visual presentation – the new Urban Influence website was built against mobile-first design standards, so it displays with pixel-perfect clarity on any device, on your browser of choice.

A comprehensive audit demands looking into the past in addition to the future – we dusted-off older portfolio work for a two-week-long photography marathon to document earlier efforts. Then we tackled the voice, figuratively.

Voice

The text-centric experience of Urban Influence remained the same entity, just a bit older, a bit wiser, and in the process, more self-aware; we’ve graduated from college and discovered the concept of ‘more for less’ extends beyond ramen noodles and cheap fruit-tinged clear beers. While some of our case studies are lengthier, our overall copy content is more definite and distilled, and ultimately, we hope you’ll feel enticed to engage your communication device of choice to contact us.

Let’s talk

And on that note, we restructured how we connect with people. We now offer a project starter form in addition to a general contact request form. While some potential clients are at point one-of-ten in the agency discovery phase, others know precisely what they want and how they want it – our contact process accounts for this.

Do let us know

As you peruse our online goods, please let us know if you find issues along the way.

Alternatively, if you’d find pleasure in heaping praise upon us for our design / content / impressive beards and / or love of all things Swazey, we’ll shamelessly amass as many compliments as our in-boxes can handle.

Yesterday was a big day for us over here at Urban Influence. Our new site snagged a few Website of the Day Awards!

After much time designing and coding a site to showcase our work and new brand, it feels great to pull a few industry nods.

CSS Design Awards

The judges at CSS Design Awards were kind enough to present us with their prestigious Website of the Day award. Thanks guys! We’re humbled and honored.

Go check it out

CSS Winner

CSS Winner also saw fit to grant us their Website of the Day award. A heartfelt thanks to the CSS Winner crew.

Go sneak a peak

A Big Ass Thanks

And one more big ass thanks to all the folks who voted for us. By the way, one more day to vote for us on the Awwwards. Just sayin…

We’re super proud to announce that our new site is featured on the Awwwards!

Showcasing the most important work from across the interwebs, it’s always an honor to be included amongst such great company. We truly appreciate the nod and all the Awwwards does to push the industry forward. Fingers crossed for a Site of the Day win. Stay Tuned.

Go Vote For Us

Oh yeah, we’d also love you support. So head on over and Vote for Us

A new brand for Wood Shed Production.

We had way too much fun cranking this newbie for Michael Osburn, a local ‘woodsmith’ who handcrafts beautiful wood furniture from his shed out in Kirkland, WA. Michael is a retired architect and special events planner (countless Rose Bowls, Olympics, Super Bowls and World Cups!) turned wood furniture maker. He’s also the father of our ever-serious art director Chaun.

We had tons o fun creating logos with arrows, arrows making X’s, feathered monograms, centered lock-ups, woodcut type—you name it, we tried it. Even the business cards are custom stamped, making it all feel very handcrafted by hand—which is a big part of Wood Shed’s brand story.

He also looked to us for help in creating a new website for Wood Shed. He had a website through Shopify, but it wasn’t performing as well as planned, so our new thought was to craft a future-proof—really simple—yet engaging site with beautiful photos of pieces and progress. It contains a clear call-to-action and looks and functions just as great on all screen sizes. It also takes advantage of a live Instagram feed, custom built by Stephen.

This brand was just a lot of fun to make, Michael let us have full reign, and we’re really pleased with the result. Check out those results over on the work page.

Old Creek, primarily a custom, solid-wood door manufacturing business based in Bend, Oregon, was looking to combine all of their operations (doors, wall beds and custom cabinetry) to create a more cohesive brand.

We crafted a new logo, designed out some amazing stationery collateral, refined their older truck with some new art, and built a future-proof website that takes advantage of full photography. We also worked with Old Creek to refine their strategy—everything from a total reorganization of their current process, to buying a better camera to further document every step of the story and build more complete case studies.

This journey resulted in an industry-leading online experience that expands the range of possibilities of all three product lines. It also plays up their custom design skills, craftsmanship and white-glove shipping. We’re really proud of the final result, have a look at it over here.

After 60 years in the furniture business and several years with a dated website, Watson Furniture Group approached us to give their new website a total overhaul.

Where the old site was a nested, fixed-sized relic with small images and a lot of disconnected copy, the new site is image-focused with a very simple long-form narrative structure that unburied specification information with a bold but clean aesthetic. Working with lots of different image types and style, we added new humanistic photography, giving context and richness to their products, and created a bridge between their existing isolated renders with the flat line drawings of their technical specifications and construction drawings with the introduction of 2.5D iconography.

Our biggest organizational challenge was usership—the old site was not user-friendly, either by potential customers or by Watson employees. Capturing past experiences through interviews with their team, partners, clients, and customers in directed but casual discussions allowed us to create user personas that illuminated what information customers were actually looking for. A Clean concise organization with an aesthetic that elevated and differentiated their product lines became our number one objective.

We created a color palette that distinguished between each line and complemented the featured product’s accessories and finishes. Introducing a new image style—photography—allowed us to dress and style the pieces to showcase their functionality, versatility, and function, while using color and props to differentiate between lines. Art Direction by Urban Influence, Photography by Amos Morgan.

We also brought their guiding principles and commitment to sustainable business and environmental practices to the forefront, highlighting their efforts to source locally, recycle their own industrial byproducts, and reduce land-fill contribution to below 4% (and shrinking).

The Watson Furniture website has been nominated for an Awwward, CSS Design Award, and CSS Winner. Visit the Watson website, vote for our design, and check back in a few weeks for the full case study on our new website!

Judged by a international jury of amazing designers, developers and agencies, the Awwwards highlights the most badass work getting dropped across the industry.

It’s a true honor to be amongst such great company, and we’re super excited to announce that our latest site for Watson Furniture Group is featured on the Awwwards! We’d love your support, so head on over and give us a Vote for Site of the Day.

Other High Fives

Additional nods include nominations on CSS Design Awards and CSS Winner. Vote for us and win yourself our eternal gratitude. Thanks for the love guys!

We found a lot of great tables looking around, but nothing that fit exactly what we needed. I wasn’t crazy about the tables that were veneered, and most of the styles that I was into were unfortunately just too big – currently we have a big enough space to house a decent size table, but who knows if we will still have the dining space in the next place we move to.

We decided that whatever we bought would need to be scalable. So, having parents that have been building things for as long as I can remember (and the tools to enable that), I thought, “Hey! I could just build what we need!” A quick call and my dad was down to help me out, and I stopped by Crosscut Hardwoods down in SODO here in Seattle (an awesome lumber store FYI) and picked up some black walnut. It took about an hour comparing grains and making sure I wouldn’t end up short one way or another, but I left the store feeling confident and excited to start on this new project!

After I had the boards I wanted, we started off by running them through a planer and a jointer so they would sit flush together. The two outside boards were wider than the middle, so we evened it all out, ending with two 13″ wide boards on the outside and a 9″ wide board running down the middle. They needn’t be even, but absolutely had to be symmetrical. From there, we used a biscuit cutter (an old tool of my grandfathers, which my dad had inherited) to quickly measure out and place in the biscuits before applying glue and clamping the boards together, carefully making sure the boards created as level of a surface as was possible at the time (sanding could take the rest down.)

After everything had dried we went to sanding with some low-grit sandpaper, using my dad’s old but always powerful orbital sander and running my new palm sander for its maiden voyage. Other than one or two spots, we made quick work on the first pass. The table was starting to come together! The next step was routing a 45-degree angle on the lower edge of the table, all the way around. We grabbed my dad’s router (another inheritance from my grandfather) and quick had the job done, and ended the day taking some loose sandpaper and softening up the edges.

With the next visit came the most stressful step: cutting the leaves. Now that we had the table top getting pretty close to being done, save for one or two more passes with the sanders, we needed to cut 15″ off both ends for the two drop-leaves I had envisioned. I gritted my teeth, measured three or four times and we finally made the cut. Thankfully it went perfectly thanks to my dad’s years of experience! Now that the majority of the table top was done, we went to installing the legs (black walnut as well) and installing some perpendicular supports on the bottom (5 of them). Within these, we would install the mechanism to keep the leaves up. We sanded down four extra boards, and waxed them up so they would slide in/out smoothly.

After a lot of working and waiting, we finally were reaching the final stretch. We mounted the leaves with six hinges, installed shims to keep the leaves steady and made some slight adjustments to make sure the leaves were flush with the rest of the table when extended.

It was finally time for the finish – something that required its own hefty bit of research. I had finally settled on a tung oil varnish product called Waterlox (a truly awesome product). I put the initial coat on the table (and a piece of Maple we had been working on as well) and sat back in awe as the oil seeped in to the grain of the walnut and began to bring out the beautiful grain the wood is known for. Over the next few weeks, my mom happily offered to apply several more coats to build up a durable layer of protection.

It was finally done! The process was a lot of work and quite a bit of time, and I enjoyed every second of it. As always, it was awesome to spend so much time with both my parents as we worked on this together, and not only do I have an awesome table to show for it but also some amazing memories! A huge thanks to both of them, Robert and Laura Saxton for taking their time to help me with this! I’ve already designed out plans for a bookshelf and a cabinet and can’t wait to start on those now that the table is done!

Ever wondered what’s below the boat? Well, a husband/wife duo from Bellingham, WA decided to figure it out and ended up creating these wonderful wood charts depicting bathymetric charts (think underwater topographic maps).

The result is really stunning—it really opens up a whole other world you don’t really ever get to see like this. Check out the delicate balance of some of these pieces. Now, there’s a whole new world to explore under the water.

Below The Boat

Interested in snagging one up for yourself? Then head on over to Below The Boat and get one now.

When Chef’n needed to launch a new site to accompany their revolutionary new home ice cream maker – available exclusively at Williams-Sonoma – they needed a site that would not only promote their new product, but demonstrated how it worked to potential customers who have never seen anything like it before.

Positioned as an educational piece, we used the simplicity of the product itself as a reference point for the website, tying in the established aesthetic of the packaging, and translated that experience seamlessly to mobile devices for ice-cream lovers on the go!

An integrated marketing plan is expressed with the site’s design – a design that is formatted to integrate with social communication platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. This allows users to spread the website’s content, sharing recipes and photos with each other, with Chef’n, and potentially winning contests and giveaways in the process.

We created a user experience that, through simple scrolling, illustrated how the Sweet Spot Ice Cream Maker works. Because it’s as simple as it looks!

Buy your own Sweet Spot here. And visit the official Chef’n Sweet Spot Ice Cream Maker website for fun videos, recipes, and additional products.

Check out our case study on the project

Strategically Positioned / Beautifully Designed

How do you emotionally connect with seemingly disparate sets of target audiences? How do you build a brand that helps guide a company’s growth? How do you establish a brand voice that dances between the professional and the approachable?

These were just a few of the challenges when we started working with the Puget Sound Bike Share non-profit on the branding for their new bike share program in early 2014. So when Seattle spoke Urban Influence listened – and we asked a lot of people!

Pronto is fast,  global, and easy to say. It speaks to – and can be pronounced by – all of its target audiences, locals and non-english speaking tourists alike.

And that makes a lot of sense: Pronto is simple, convenient, easily accessible transportation that liberates users from the prescribed, the pre-determined and the mundane. This fun alternative to public transportation encourages exploration and adventure, is instantly identifiable, and quintessentially Seattle.

Conceptually and visually grounded in a strong sense of place, the Pronto personality is a casual yet bespoke travel experience that celebrates and elevates the local urban fabric, dynamically integrating the system and its users into a rapidly changing transportation vasculature.

Pronto’s graphic language is a high contrast representation of the Pacific Northwest and the urban landscape you’ll see when using Pronto’s bike share program.

Pronto rolls out fall 2014, so be sure to stay connected:

Check here for the full case study.

It’s important in this life to draw inspiration from your surroundings, or in this case from things you find on the internet.

Inspired by the very first Bullitt helmet, this is a modern take on the original. A perfect helmet for riders looking for that vintage look with current technology.

Those lines, that character, the technology. This concept version of the Land Rover discovery would be sure to turn heads, if it ever was realized. I will take the inspiration and run with it.

Electric cruiser, unusual looks. Designed and made in Austria, this strange looking cycle wins prize for both great innovation and borderline ugly looks, but no doubt inspirational.

Here’s a bright idea. This new bulb from Philips looks amazing and mad props for actually looking like a light bulb.

You can never go wrong with Nike. An old school design for sure, this timeless classic is and always will be a source of inspiration for me.

Finally, this beaut of a sports car, the Speedback GT. It just looks the part all the time. Sit back and be inspired, or speed away in a Bond film.