What do you get when you combine media experience, writing expertise, art & illustration skills, incredibly photography, and new media knowlege?  You get a full-service agency that’s pretty tough to beat, and that’s Grand Central Communications here in Tulsa, OK.

Grand Central Communications

The logo for Grand Central was designed by Cecil Cummings.  We took that and applied some, “variations on a theme” to develop the website template, and kept the clean, professional, black & white look and feel.  This allows the photographs and portfolio pieces of the site, the work, to speak for itself.  On this design, we approached it from the standpoint that “less is more”, and created something very simple, but also very elegant.

Total Server Solutions

Started in January, 2005, Total Server Solutions is a leading managed services firm serving clients of all sizes, from small and medium sized businesses to enterprises. With four fully-certified server administrators and dedicated team of support staff, Total Server Solutions provides intimate customer service and a unique hands-on approach to server management.

We not only designed the current site for TSS, we’re also a customer.  So needless to say, we worked very closely together on this project for several months, and there was about 6 different versions of this design.  Above was my original pitch to them. This is what the final result ended up being:

Total Server Solutions - Final

Not totally out of the ballpark, but quite significantly different from where the idea started.  In the end, we developed a site that TSS is very happy with, and we’re glad to say that our two companies are even closer now than we were when we started on that long journey.

In Defense of Animals

You win some, you lose some. But even sometimes working on a pitch, or working on a website design you’re not sure it is ever going to see the light of day, you still learn a whole lot.

In Defense of Animals is a non-profit who’s mission is to end animal exploitation, cruelty, and abuse by protecting and advocating for the rights, welfare, and habitats of animals, as well as to raise their status beyond mere property, commodities, or things.

Late this summer we pitched the idea to re-design the website for IDA.  The idea behind the re-design was primarily what our goal always is for a project like this:  take a website that was developed a few years previous, and find a more organized, more user-friendly way to present it’s content, while cleaning up the look and feel.  At the same time, we wanted to keep the logo, keep the same branding / identity of the organization, not stray too far from their use of type, color, etc.

You can see the full-size layout here.  This was a great exercise in refining our re-design skills; keeping the essence of an established brand while at the same time totally re-doing the layout and presentation.

Christians for Biblical Equality

In late December of 2007, during Tulsa’s very harsh ice storms, the print layout team of Evolution Studios (a.k.a. Carlos Moreno), faced with no electricity for about a week, packed up and relocated to Abeline, Texas (a.k.a. my parents’ house).  It’s amazing how much of one’s office you can fit in to a 2000 Toyota Camry.

It was from that temporary office space that we worked with in collaboration with W3 Design Studios to create the 2008 catalog Christians for Biblical Equality, also known as CBE International (click here to view the PDF).

Christians for Biblical Equality is a non-profit organization comprised of individual and church members from more than 80 denominations who believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the fundamental equality of men and women of all ethnicities and all economic classes.  It’s not often that we work with faith-based organizations, but we felt a good connection with CBE, and of course we had a big desire to help out.

In the spring of 2008 (back in Tulsa, and much warmer, not to mention grateful for electric power…), we were asked to help re-design the CBE International website.  What you see above is one of my first drafts of the new CBE website design, which to this day I still consider to be one of the best ’site designs of my career.

Colleen J. Payne

Another greatly rewarding website project we worked on this summer was one that was referred to us by our good friends at Tag Team Marketing, in Tulsa.  We worked on some enhancements to the site; adding the link to her new book, “I Did It My Way and…It Worked!“, adding a photo gallery, moving around some of the content to make the website more user-friendly, adding a contact form, and re-templating the site to run on wordpress.

We then spent some time with Colleen, showing her how to update, edit, and maintain her own website.  She now has the ability to keep her readers and her audience update on her speaking engagements, latest news, etc.

It’s been a great pleasure working with Mrs. Nabors, and reading her book.  She’s one of the many local entrepreneurs that we’ve worked with over the years, are able to help in the areas that we know, and she in turn has inspired us and taught us a great deal.