Journal

Design Director Client

We just redid our graphics and website, pretty obvious. But that also means I was a design client. Interesting to sit on that side of the table.

One of my favorite graphics from the process is an image from Jennifer Scrivner who revamped our print graphics. She laid out our pages using a grid system to accommodate different size images and text. The underlying logic of it all was beautiful. If you are one of our clients, you will see her work in our contracts, transmittals and design presentation format.

Matt Rowland at Trigger Design is the designer behind our website. As compared to the print graphics, I had much more “specific” ideas about how our website would look but very limited knowledge about web design. This made his job harder.

The process with our website reminded me of our architecture work with design orientated clients. Over the last few years we have had the opportunity to design homes for Design Directors for storied companies such as Apple, Ideo and Levis. All of those clients had a very specific design vision for their project but they also shared something else – a sense of trust. Once we established the shared vision with our clients we were able to design freely and add unexpected big ideas and small nuances to their projects. Having a vision and controlling the outcome are two very different things.

Matt gained my trust and made our website more dynamic and content rich while maintaining the sense of straightforward design simplicity that signifies Red Dot Studio. I hope you like the result as much as we do.

All of this redesign was fairly seamless given the talented team who set up our original graphics. Eszter Rabin designed our logo, our old website that was an inspiration point and the business cards we still use. Colleen Pichė set up the basics of our collateral materials which Jennifer built from.