BALLISTIC AGENCY

The Brief

BRANDING / PRINT / INTERACTIVE / UX&UI

Re-brand Duke Corporation of America (DCA) into Ballistic Agency. The goal was to create the branding, an identity, a website, and other collateral material that was needed to showcase a step forward and reach out to bigger and new clients. Showing off our “Digital First” approach to marketing and advertising. The task called for me to re-brand the agency, make a new identity, and build us a website.

THE PROCESS

BRAINSTORMING & RESEARCH

The first step was getting every stakeholder together and doing a mind-map of what “Ballistic” was to them, and what kind of ideas we could use to make our brand. I also looked at other digital and interactive agencies to see how they presented themselves.

FINDING THE BRAND

Next I conducted some tests and surveys to get a feel for what the brand meant to the people that were a part of it. Specifically I used a brand personality spectrum to set the tone for design and copy writing.

The Identity

Next I set out to build an identity. After trying some sumi-e style, we landed on a harsher more digital version to fit in better with the clientele we had, and hoped to squire. The final logo is made to look high-end, but also like a stencil in order to fit in with a more military approach. I also rotated the terminals of the letter forms to be reminiscent of rifling in a barrel. Finally we put the “dot” to both represent the literal dot in the website (ballistic.agency) but also a projectile, or an ink mark at the start of a drawing.

Some Sketches

Roughs

Color Studies

Final Logo

Researching, Writing, and Designing White Papers for Customer Lead Generation

THE BRAND

After building the logo mark, I worked to incorporate it into a brand and style-guide. Finalizing the brand idea it settled on a futuristic, digital, sort of sci-fi-esque landscape (to match the original sumi-e idea), but with bright neon colors to truly utilize RGB colors and make it seem high tech and eye-catching. The brand was intended to be bold, stark, and digital.

Business Cards

5 Better Values Poster / Office Decoration

THE USER EXPERIENCE / GETTING INTERACTIVE

After getting the basis of the branding, I next set out to create the user experience, and the website. First I created personas based off the clients we had, and the clients we wanted, and ran them through a variety of user journeys to see what pain points we should address, and how we could make the process as smooth as possible. I also utilized an open card sort to help define a menu structure and website hierarchy. Finally I took screenshots of many great websites with a variety of design choices and styles, and showed them to stake-holders to get a feeling on what they liked and disliked to finish narrowing down the brand look.

Getting Stake Holders Involved / Design Gut Test

Personas

User Journey Maps

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

The next step was making wire frames, prototypes, and the high fidelity mock-ups while narrowing down and defining the design for the website. Design wise it was very important to me to plan from mobile first, and then add additional features to desktop as space allowed. A big consideration I made was not hiding important navigation elements behind a hamburger menu, so that they could have more discover-ability. Then I began to build it as a static site. I made strong use of SCSS properties to make a template with components that would be easy to swap out, change, and adjust. Primarily css transitions were used for the animations, but occasionally javascript and the greensock framework were used when necessary. The goal in development was to keep it light, and quick loading while providing ease of future changes and additions.