On Monday, March 1, 2010, the new Friends Fiduciary Corporation website was launched. You can see that the new brand reflects a much more contemporary look that competes well with other financial service entities in the marketplace today.

Project Objectives

• Contemporary, simple, clean, new brand design
• Feature the performance of the FFC Consolidated Fund more prominently
• Highlight Socially Responsible Investing and what that is all about
• Enable site updates to be easily performed by Friends Fiduciary staff
• Increase search engine performance in the natural search results on relevant keywords
• An integrated blog and RSS feed

The new website is built upon the WordPress content management system which allows the Friends Fiduciary staff to add, edit and delete their site content using a standard web browser. It also allowed us to incorporate and integrate a blog and RSS feed under the Dialogue on Current Issues tab. WordPress positions Friends Fiduciary’s content in an accessible, search-engine friendly manner, and provides them a great tool for unpacking their web strategy as time goes on.

Future Goals

One of the potential future web goals of Friends Fiduciary is to incorporate private client/user accounts. This will enable each client to track how their specific funds and accounts are performing, as well as to communicate in a secure manner with their Friends Fiduciary account managers. Headstand Media envisions a dashboard of rich reporting tools and interfaces to give the client quick visual feedback on their account, with the ability to drill deeper as needed.

Project Strategy

Headstand Media, a Chicago web design company, met with the founders of The Blacksmith Project soon after the construction of the aforementioned recording studio, and provided a comprehensive web strategy that focused on:

• Logo design, branding, and messaging
• Educating the client in regard to Web 2.0 best practices and social media
• How to tell a captivating story and engage the culture
• Developing a dynamic, compelling website

The Blacksmith Project needed a site that was both visually exciting and able to handle multiple user accounts. Since there were a handful of artists involved, it was important that each artist had their own unique area of the site, where they could develop their own content and sell their music. Equally of importance was the building of the site with a technology that would be versatile and scalable for future expansion and additional features.

Project Technology and Integration

Theblacksmithproject.com was built in a content management system called WordPress, the world’s largest blogging and content management platform, using open source technology. For this particular project we used WordPress MU, to facilitate multiple users and accounts. We designed the custom theme that controls the way the site looks and feels, using industry standard best practices in HTML, PHP, SEO, Javascript, and CSS web coding. The site is an excellent example of our balanced approach of creativity + technology—a strategy we consistently employ as we’re solving business problems for our customers.

More About The Blacksmith Project

The Blacksmith Project was founded in 2007 by Duncan Mathieson and Mark Filippi, both longtime musicians with a passion to both teach and empower new artists in their pursuit of recording, performing, songwriting, and promoting themselves and their own original music. The founders met around the time that Duncan was considering retirement from a business career and Mark was an interim worship pastor at Moraine Valley Church.

Since its inception and the completion of the recording studio in Bull Valley, Illinois, The Blacksmith Project has amassed a handful of talented musicians and hosted benefit concerts in their area. One of their big goals is to raise awareness and support for local ministries and meaningful causes in order to impact their local community. Their next free concert will be on February 6th at the Raue Center for the Arts in Crystal Lake, Illinois and will begin at 7:00pm. The concert will benefit the Crystal Lake Food Pantry.

For more information on The Blacksmith Project, their artists, and their events, please visit them at www.theblacksmithproject.com!

Project Strategy

Headstand Media provided a comprehensive online web strategy that has made HBN Brand Design the online leader amongst its competitors. HBN desired that we help them contemporize and update their web image and presence. We did this visually by moving away from a corporate look and more towards a contemporary, young and professional feel.

Special attention was taken when building hbnbranddesign.com to create a site that was designed with best SEO practices so HBN can compete on important keywords in their industry. This new website helps HBN tell their story, share their personality, and shows off the excellent creative and strategic services they can offer their clients.

Project Technology and Integration

For the more technically inclined, the site was built in a content management system called WordPress, the world’s largest blogging platform, using open source technology. Headstand Media created the custom theme that controls the way the site looks and feels, using industry standard best practices in HTML, SEO, Javascript, Flash and CSS web coding. Headstand Media brings a balanced approach of creativity+technology to solving business problems for all our customers.

What HBN Has to Say

“THANK YOU Headstand team, for all your consulting, practical advice and hard work in designing our new web site.

We believe the site is easy to use, clearly reflects the business we’re in, the services we offer, and tells our brand story in a fresh new way. The site also does a great job of addressing client needs and showcasing our expertise & creative designs. The site is so rich with visual content, yet has a simple look. We are very pleased.

We are also confident that the latest SEO strategies and technologies used will result in increased traffic and thereby additional business opportunities for HBN. A great selling tool. Thanks for going the extra mile in meeting our deadlines. ”

Dwight Nelson – President of HBN Brand Design

More About HBN Brand Design

HBN is a Chicago package design firm with over 35 years of expertise that is dedicated to telling unique stories through Brand Identity Development, New Product Introductions, Brand Repositionings, Package Redesigns and Integrated Marketing Communications in the B2C arena.

They are experts at visually reflecting a brand’s essence and getting the right messages to the target audience, resulting in great designs that sell products, emotionally connect to the consumer, build brand awareness and increase market share. Get to know the HBN Brand Design team.

We are very pleased to announce our partnership and association with SiLyte, a Chicago-based advanced materials company that manufactures next generation organosilicon electrolytes for use in Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) batteries. This advanced battery technology offers unmatched safety, performance, and reliability. SiLyte is part of a growing alliance of US manufacturers who have a plan in place to win back the leading edge position in battery technology for the US.

The company logo and brand identity as well as their initial website was designed and launched July 10, 2009 by Headstand Media. As with many small- to medium-size organizations, WordPress offers a powerful, simple and cost effective solution for web content management. In this case, SiLyte was able to write and post the site-written content themselves using the WordPress tools, with minimal training from Headstand Media. As the company grows and its needs change, we will be able to easily add and integrate news blogs, RSS Feeds, commenting, social network connections, discussion and many other web 2.0 features, without going back to the drawing board. We find that this kind of affordable, reliable, flexible and scalable approach is what most businesses and organizations need and are seeking in today’s technical and economic climate.

Case in point: Sunshine Gospel Ministries required a new Chicago website design which Headstand completed in 2008. Out of that web project arose the need for a new printed brochure that the ministry could use to communicate more about itself to donors and prospects, students and other potential supporters – something people could hold in their hand that would connect them to the heart and energy of Sunshine’s work.

Headstand Media used the basic web design as a starting point, and developed a print piece that reflects similar color, design and aesthetic themes, yet taps into the unique capabilities of print communication. Photography was a key artistic component that we helped to direct and select from various sources.

The final product was an 8-page brochure that pulled together design elements from the Sunshine Gospel Ministries website, bold images of people and a unique urban feel. With room on the back cover for a mail panel, as well as a sleeve pocket on the inside back cover designed for a creative print insert, the brochure gave Sunshine a new way to connect with the people in their community and extend their efforts outside of the web.

The Modern Day Joseph campaign is a call to action targeted at Christian teens – to fully equip them to be spiritual champions, to enable then to grow closer to God, and make good moral decisions.

The design objectives for this project was to create a logo that was a contemporary and forward feeling logo that would target both adult ministry leaders and teens themselves.

Here was our first batch of logos we created during the initial phase of this project.

The logos were paired down until we ended up with our final Modern Day Joseph Logo.

You can see how the logo was used both in various print ads and at the Modern Day Joseph website.

Below is a sample of the logos Benjamin Nelson created for LootPlanet. The logo in color was the final logo chosen. Today, Benjamin provides Chicago Logo Design services through Headstand Media.