hustlewood

Quincy’s got a brand new blog.

We just wrapped up work on RapidFire. We’ll be adding a bit of action to the homepage soon, but as you can see, it’s a simple, easy-to-navigate marketing site. We also did the name, logo and brand positioning.

RapidFire Systems makes software for the military and for commercial clients. Word has it they like what we’ve done for them.

What do you think?

Here’s a logo we’ve done for our friend at exitcreative. He has started a new venture making custom ping pong paddles. We’re also designing his site. Best of luck!

Yeah, that’s some hot out-of-home action for you.

No, not FDR’s new deal.

Our new deal. Should have the same effects on depression, though.

We’re a small company. And we want to help out other small-ish companies by giving them a break with some friend pricing. For the indefinite future, we’ll be taking on up to two “friend” website projects per month for half the price that we’d normally charge. We’ll charge you a flat fee for a fairly kick-ass website. We’d like to put the price up here but we don’t want to seem easy.

In exchange for the flat friend fee, you’ve got to do your part and act like a friend. You know, play nice. Get back to us quickly. Be open to new things. Come to our office and hang out. Drink the last of the milk and put it back in the fridge. That kind of thing. You should be in Chicago because it’s expensive to travel. Makes it hard to give friend prices, dig?

So give us a holler at 312.929.4548 or fire an email our way.

Here’s our portfolio (big PDF, look out) if you want to see what we’ve done.

We love beer. We love our favorite local bar, The Beer Bistro. And we’ve convinced them that they should let us re-do their website. Which we’re gonna do. Check back soon to see how it turns out.

Ahh.

It’s finally done. We launched the new Train Strong website on Saturday, July 7 (7/7/7). It’s full of cool stuff, and there’s yet more to be added in the future. We’re very happy with it. So check it out if you have a chance.

Here’s a little walkthrough of the site:

The homepage and all the main overview pages have some Flash to keep things looking cool. And each page that has a Flash element has identical links in HTML for accessibility. On that tip, the site’s designed to be accessible for all kinds of audiences.

And this is what it looks like when you roll over “Group Outdoor Fitness”… It matches the ads that we’re doing for Train Strong right now. All you IMC kids rejoice.

And we built a nice little store for it with the help of our partners/clients, XOTech, for all the merchandise (which we also designed).

And this is the store page…

And we used a neat Google Maps API for all the locations, and (again, with the help of XOTech) made it link up to the back-end, where we can add new locations and such. This makes it a lot easier for people to find the camp they want, which was the biggest problem with the last site.

And we used WordPress MU to build a blog network for Train Strong. We found that each of their locations had their own little community, so we figured it made sense to develop a communication tool for these communities to interact with online. Each one of the location owner/operators will be able to run the blog (and a unique Flickr account) autonomously. It’ll take time for this part of the site to really “grow up”, but we think it’ll be a really powerful tool for getting and retaining members. The image below is of the Corporate Blog, which has 4 authors. Should be fun!

So this is the product of our hard work, and with the help of our awesome client, it came out really nice. We hope you all like it!

Last weekend, Hustlewood went to Barnsley Gardens, just north of Atlanta (Adairsville, Georgia, to be specific) to meet with a couple clients and some other folks who might be interested in what we do. We stayed for two nights in a quad-room house. And in short, Barnsley Gardens is one of the most spectacular places we’ve ever been.

The three pictures above are all also on our Flickr page. They’re of the original Barnsley family ruins, which are the centerpiece for the resort.  The original Italianate villa was built in 1842 as a refuge for Godfrey Barnsley’s ailing wife, Julia Scarborough. But in 1906, the roof was torn off by a tornado and the villa was never fully repaired. It’s breathtaking. The rest of the resort features individual cottages that serve as guest rooms, excellent food, wine & scotch and a great little golf course (though Hustlewood didn’t get a chance to play it). Anyway, it’s fantastic and if you need to get away you should check it out.

Our meetings went very well, both with Train Strong (we discussed the new apparel line, the new website and the Advanced Performance program) and with our friends at DGTrials. We’re working with them on a super top-secret program that is set to launch in October. Stay tuned for that, as well as the new trainstrong.com site that should launch this Saturday, 7/7/7.

This is our new table. We plan, like other agencies that we admire, to work on one big table, instead of at little desks. Desks suck. Big, butcherblock tables with natural steel legs are cool. If you can’t be inspired sitting at this table, you’re crazy. We’re getting our “Parsons” table delivered from Room & Board, in Chicago, and it’s 78″ x 42″. Just right for three folks. When/if we grow we’ll have to grab us another one. It was not cheap. But besides the computers, and the chairs, this is the most important part of the office. Not a place to scrimp.

And our new couches, from Rowe, by way of Roy’s Furniture Company in Chicago. They’re called “Berkeley“, which we like. Ours will be brownish. We got two.

Just in case you were wondering how we plan to set this thing up, here’s the layout.