Th3 Wood || Yes the 3 should be backwards…

Top’o'the mid-morning to y’all. Early Friday AM a few weeks ago, we launched a site for our favorite bar in the West Loop, The Beer Bistro. The Beer Bistro is one of the mainstays of Madison Street (just on the other, more chill side of the expressway) and offers an incredible selection of beers, most of which we’ve sampled. So about a year ago, we badgered the owner, Bob, into letting us re-do his site (which you can see here) and he finally obliged.

The home page, above, features a compressed view of the bar, as photographed by Quincy. Armand got it all working in Flash and whipped together some sweet, largely table-less markup, I wrote some copy and made some final dev tweaks, and now we’re live.

About Page… nothing super special here except for the cool gMap wrapper.

Galleries page, powered by Flickr of course.

And a page for their sweet gear, enabled by everyone’s favorite, Flash.

Hope you like. We’ll be rolling out some improvements over the coming weeks/months.

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.

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!

Here’s a banner we just did for Train Strong to go on the 790 the Zone website. Train Strong has a weekly radio show (Train Strong Radio) where they talk about fitness tips and such. Their station focuses on guys in the Atlanta area, so we wanted to give them something to think about:

Be fit.

Get more ______. (Fill in the blank)

Train Strong.

And get your head out of the gutter!

It’s approved. And we’re all in love with it. The goal was to create an icon that represented Train Strong that could eventually be used independently of the name. As you can tell by looking at the previous post, we stuck with their established Century Gothic font, fussed with the colors and added the Train Strong Flame. And it works well with the text and without.

Though it’s a distinctive icon just by its design, we like that there’s so many different meanings for so many different people…ranging from the Olympic torch (the enduring symbol for amateur athletics) to an internal fire or dedication. And there’s a nice little Easter egg in there for all you logo-lovers. See if you can find it. Onward now to the Train Strong website…

Here’s our new logo for XOtech. It came out of several discussions about military icons, fresh logos we liked, and some colors that the client loved. We rather like it. And it’s all wrapped up with a clean affordance effect that pops off their homepage (coming soon). Their new tagline, “Empowering the Mission” gets to their ability to handle any need (business or defense), no matter the size or complexity.

And for our friends at Green Light Networks, we’ve finalized the following update. It had to render well at small sizes (for use on the web) and had to convey their ability to turn those little red lights green. Keep it simple, right?