We won an award!
Well, actually, we won five awards. And we want to take just a minute and give you a quick tour of three of our incredible projects that were recognized for excellence at the 2019 Addy Awards from the American Advertising Federation (AAF) — Heartland.
Held on February 23 at Downstream Casino Resort in Quapaw, Ok., the 2019 Addy Awards recognized the region’s creative agencies for their work in a variety of categories. We submitted three projects and came home with five awards.
Two Home Runs for ACES Baseball, a Brooklyn-Based Baseball Agency
Won a Judges Award Winner for Overall Design
Won a Gold Addy for Consumer Website
In the summer of 2017, we were contacted by ACES Baseball, a Brooklyn-based sports agency. ACES wanted a new website that could impress its web-savvy prospects and articulate the quality of its suite of services. Did we mention that Forbes has ACES ranked as the second most powerful agents in baseball? And as the fourth most powerful agents in all of sports? That feels important to mention.
To kick off our partnership, we flew to New York and met with ACES' partners and team members. After just a few short weeks, we started designing a website that could showcase one of the coolest, most successful brands in sports.
We started our process for ACES by asking a simple question: how do we capture the grit, attitude, and uncompromising work ethic of one of the hardest working teams in baseball? Easy. Start with their home base: Brooklyn.
From there, we layered in different methods of showcasing the company’s success, including images of some of its most popular players and eye-popping statistics about the contracts its team has negotiated. We incorporated quotes from some of baseball’s most notable voices describing the agency’s hustle and no-nonsense approach. To round home plate (get it?), we added intuitive, engaging motion elements to provide users with a browsing experience that matches the sheer awesomeness of working with the ACES team.
The result was a... wait for it...
home run.
Two Triumphs for 417 Magazine, a Regional Publication
Won a Gold Addy for Responsive Design
Won a Silver Addy for Single Page Design
If you’re a 417 land-er, you’ve probably read an issue of 417 Magazine. The regional publication has been showcasing the best food, fashion, and culture that the Springfield metropolitan area has to offer for more than 20 years.
In 2017, the 417 team reached out to us to build new websites for its lifestyle, business, and home brands that would adequately reflect the quality of its award-winning print publications. We started by wondering out loud what a 417 reader really needs from a digital experience. Rather than guess the answer to that question, we just started asking readers—more than a thousand of them, in fact. Twelve hundred survey responses, a few focus groups, and a data-driven-breakdown-of-user-behaviors-so-insightful-would-make-you-blush later, we started designing.
Our goal was to feature the publication’s juiciest content while still giving readers intuitive navigational paths for accessing 417’s well-established and popular content categories, like “People Pics”.
Thanks to all that research, we knew many users were likely to access the site via their phones, so we took extra care to ensure that the user experience across devices didn’t sacrifice featured content for clear navigation.
Then we built a custom content management system capable of handling thousands of articles, images, and events. We designed a calendar that gives users a clear picture of the coolest things happening in the Ozarks. And we introduced a tagging system that would encourage readers to move seamlessly between related pieces of content, ensuring their digital journey through 417 was as natural as holding the magazine in their hands.
A Happiness-Inducing Win for Burrell Behavioral Health
Won a Silver Addy for User Experience
Serving more than 40,000 clients across 17 counties in Missouri, Burrell Behavioral Health has become the regional leader in mental and behavioral health services. In 2018, the organization decided that it was time to expand its influence, seeking to provide greater access to critical services to thousands more in both its existing locations and in new parts of the country. But Burrell's brand and digital presence was a cap on its ability to grow. So we met with the Burrell team, developed a clear understanding of its goals, and got to work.
We began the process by attempting to understand the current national dialogue on mental health—then we challenged ourselves to imagine what the next conversation should be. It became clear that accessibility, openness, and engagement were the next evolution of mental and behavioral health approaches. But how do you capture the essence of discussions about mental health in an identity, brand, and logo?
Like this.
The next challenge, then, was representing that brand across an entire digital property. To accomplish this big ask, we threw out traditional approaches to clinical issues, which are often steeped in jargon and feature cold color palettes, and opted for a bright and fresh design featuring people, motion, and plain language.
And to create clarity for prospective clients who weren’t quite sure what they needed, we designed a navigational system that guides users to critical information quickly.
Finally, to ensure that users who needed Burrell’s services the most had clear, readily available paths for access, we weaved entry points and contact opportunities throughout the site.
The result is an engaging, easy-to-use website that welcomes clients into the next conversation about their health.
Thanks for taking the time to look through these projects. We hope you’ve liked looking at them as much as we’ve enjoyed making them. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some of the coolest, kindest, most innovative organizations in the country, and these awards are a testament to the incredible things they’re doing.
If you want to see more of our awesome work, check out these cool projects. Or, now that you’ve perused some of our projects and you just can’t wait another second to work with us, let us know!