Happy Friday, Everyone! It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I’m proud to be able to finally announce the official launch of a project I’ve been working on with some awesome folks at Vineyard Vines. Say hello to the shiny new Vineyard Vines Blog!
I was really excited when Lindsey, the Director of Brand Communications, contacted me and pitched me the idea of building Vineyard Vines a site where they could share their stories, photos and news, and interact with their customers. The company was already experiencing a lot of success interacting with their customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They just needed a central place to bring it all together and create a sense of true community. And that’s just what we’ve done with the new site.
What I’m really happy about as a designer is that the fun-loving Vineyard Vines crew have embraced the idea of having a blog for all the reasons that makes blogs great. It’s awesome to see that the first few posts are true to what they stand for as a brand – living the good life. The stuff they’ve already posted is fun, full of personality and enthusiasm, and shows you exactly who they are, and what they care about. I love the launch video that they posted this morning – I watched it for the first time today and it put a big smile on my face. What an awesome way to set the tone and kick things off…
For those of you who’ve got 5 minutes (of course you do, it’s Friday ;-)) – head on over to the new blog and check out the new digs. If you’re already familiar with VineyardVines.com, you’ll notice that the new site integrates seamlessly with the old one – there’s virtually no difference in look and feel, even though it runs on a totally different software engine. The site runs WordPress and is built on Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme, so it’s got top-notch SEO and great optimized code on the back end. We also included some nifty interactive social elements that pull in their Facebook Fan Page activity, Twitter feed, Flickr Photos and YouTube videos – all in one place, with a look and feel that matches their brand.
That’s it from me for now. Overall, I’m really happy with the end result and I hope the Vineyard Vines community really gets into this, because they’ve got some great people on the other end of this site producing the content. Before I wrap this up, I’d like to send a special thank you to Lindz and Doug for their help and input during the project. I had a blast working with you. Good luck!
A social media project I’ve been working on this month went live today, and I’m proud to finally be able to share the final product. Second Chance is a non-profit organization based out of San Diego, CA. The organization focuses on breaking cycles of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse and incarceration through social entrepreneurship. Over the past 15 years they’ve developed an innovative support system for people in need that has an unprecedented track record for producing positive results – largely due to the unique approach they take to solving tough problems. The founder, Scott H Silverman was named a CNN hero of the week this year for his work in the space.
Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Scott, who gave me the opportunity to visit the facility and see for myself what the organization does and how it transforms people. A few months ago I spent a day sitting in on one of their classes and the experience was eye-opening and profoundly affecting. When you see the system working for yourself first hand, you get the message loud and clear. Not only is what they do great for local communities, it’s great for society overall. When they contacted me a few weeks ago about getting them into social media, I was happy to join on. Here’s a quick video that we launched the project with that gives you a snapshot of what Second Chance is all about:
Designing A Social Media Presence For Second Chance
Scott’s a forward thinking, energetic guy and he recognized early that getting in to social media makes a lot of sense for his organization. From a cost perspective, social media for a non-profit is a no brainer, but Second Chance was also generating a lot of buzz after Scott was awarded the CNN hero award and released his new book. For a non profit they had a huge amount of content distributed around the web. Before I came along, they were already into email marketing and facebook as well as posting YouTube videos and getting a ton of positive press – they just needed a way to pull it all together, brand it consistently and create a place that they owned where the community could interact and share content, resources and stories with one another. We knew when we first talked about the project that we wanted consistent branding that matched their 2010 annual report across Facebook, Twitter and a customized blog, and the project evolved from there. The final product, I think, looks pretty slick and ties each social media outlet to all the others in a clear and coherent way. Here are some screenshots of what we did. Each screenshot links to a Second Chance site, so please explore and feel free to give feedback. We’re all excited about the new direction and we hope the Second Chance community is too….
Custom WordPress Blog Design For Second Chance
Custom Facebook Welcome Page
Consistent Branding Across Facebook Tabs
Custom Twitter Branding
