Old River Creative
Phew! It’s been quite a year! Old River Creative was born on January 1, 2014. Since that time, I’ve written very few posts here on my blog, but I have had some great clients and have been part of some very exciting work. It all started with a great idea from my wife and co-owner, @ErikaORC.
Erika created the name and logo for our new business. We’re named after the Shenandoah River, where we live and play. We also gave bonus points to this idea because the acronym is wicked-cool (Lord of the Rings nerds rejoice). We moved into a new office, hired a couple of employees, and we’re off to the races with our creative projects. We’re proud of the work that we’ve done thus far, and we’re only looking up as we gaze into the future to come.
The Power of Liberal Arts
One of our very first projects as a new team was working with the Council of Independent Colleges to design and build an entirely new website targeting high school students and their parents. This website, titled The Power of Liberal Arts, advocates the importance of liberal arts in higher education. It’s a great project, an amazing program, and we like to think that the website turned out equally amazing. Our user research, information architecture, and design led to the final responsive design for the new site, shown below.
VF Sustainability & Responsibility
We worked diligently with VF Corporation for months to research, design, and plan out the development of their new Sustainability & Responsibility corporate portal. This website, built on the SharePoint platform, bent the rules of Microsoft’s enterprise product in a lot of ways. We wanted to create some truly unique customizations within SharePoint, and we came up with interesting new ways to present content to their users. While anyone can show data and information on a website, our goal was to make sustainability data interesting and interactive. The outcome of our research and design is shown below.
MainSpring
In one of our most exciting projects of the past year, we worked with two companies called Corporate Network Services and Anvil Dataworks to completely revamp the way they market their businesses. We worked with both organizations to develop an entirely new unified brand from the ground up. The result was a new company called MainSpring.
Our team spent many an hour brainstorming on ideas for the new company name, logo, typography, colors, and the like. While there were some great ideas that didn’t quite make the cut, MainSpring was the brand that rose above the rest as the obvious choice for the new direction of the company brand. Following the rebranding project, we continued with the momentum we had built and jumped right into applying this brand to all areas of their business. From new business cards and stationary, to an entirely new website, Old River Creative partnered with MainSpring to draw a new public face for their organization.
The MainSpring website is built on WordPress. This amazingly interactive experience is all about telling The MainSpring Story. It’s a great story, and we have truly enjoyed working with the good folks at MainSpring to help tell this story to the public. The result of everyone’s hard work coalesced into the final design, shown here.
Don’t take our word for it! Spin the wheel, move the sliders, and interact with all the cool features of this new website for yourself. Visit MainSpring on any device at https://www.gomainspring.com.
There’s quite a lot more to come, and a ton of great stuff that we’ve been working on that we’re not ready to share just yet. Need help on your next creative project? Visit us at Old River Creative to learn how we can help.