by Eriola Kapaj | Mar 13, 2022
Rabbit Run Builders is a construction company based in Midcoast Maine. What makes this construction company unique is its focus on building with energy-efficient practices. On my first interview with my client what blew my mind was the enthusiasm for creating nature-friendly homes with cool architecture. An amazing note is that this idea started as a one-man company, whose wife is an amazing chef, his first project was building his mom’s house and now he has a full team to help him build throughout Maine.
Objectives
- Improve overall aesthetic and user experience to make the site more engaging.
- Improve site architecture and navigation to enable easier browsing.
- Transfer old website created in Wix to WordPress with a better design and usability.
- Design an informative, professional website to attract clients.
- Create a responsive website for mobile and Ipad.
Improve overall aesthetic and user experience and to make the site more engaging
Improve site architecture and navigation to enable easier browsing
My role
When Darius, the founder of Rabbit Run Builders and main builder, contacted me to help him design a logo and a website for his company I was thrilled. Darius is a guy full of ideas and owns many skills, so to work beside him in creating a website for his company was very exciting. I worked as a freelance designer, the project lasted several months due to content creation and pictures.
I designed the logo in AI and designed the website in Sketch. Then I developed the website in WordPress using the Divi theme.
Prototyping
The purpose of this site was to inform the viewers of what abolitionism means, ways to make the audience aware of human trafficking, and finally, find and read the comic books created by the founder of Abolitionista!.
The approach was focused on reorganizing and simplifying their site structure to highlight their mission, values, and outcomes. The objective was to create a clean, clear design that let their story connect and drive conversions. We created a new, user-driven content strategy to support their refreshed content.
Style Concepts
Rabbit Run Builders is a construction company and its founder has an architecture background. For this site, his requirements were to emphasize the work his company has created so far to show all the different skills they provide.
The Homepage is easy to navigate through, with images that are bright and eye-catching, short paragraphs, iconography, and social media. The title of each page matches the font and the heaviness of the logo, and on the portfolio page, all the projects are designed as posts. It is important for a company like this to design a full of life website, with an earthly tone, minimalistic and elegant at the same time.
This website design needed to be consistent with the company’s mission and goals. A visitor to the site can instantly tell what the company does and how it would benefit their lives. It is easy to navigate through the website with the purpose of spending more time in the most important sections such as the portfolio page and the services page. It is easy to find a way to contact this company. The overall design is user-friendly, detailed oriented and informative.
Eriola Kapaj was fantastic to work with! In logo design, she was very creative and able to put together many design directions that we worked on whittling down and editing together until it spoke to the kind of thing I hoped for people to see as a representation of the business itself.
In web design, she expanded that creativity to a comprehensive palate of words, fonts, color, menus, hyperlinks, and photos. She did all this with maneuverability in mind for the desktop and smartphone, so visitors to the site can find the information they are looking for quickly and easily. She is hard working and straightforward in her communication.
I would highly recommend Eriola to anyone looking for web and logo design.
Founder of Rabbit Run Builders
by Eriola Kapaj | Mar 13, 2022
Town Common Media is a local newspaper based in Rowley, Ma. This website redesign brings a fresh, updated, and coherent digital version of the newspaper. TCM is a print-based newspaper that through this website design brings fresh local newsweekly digitally to its readers.
Challenge
- Improve overall site architecture and navigation to enable easier browsing and a more frictionless experience.
- Reorganize and expand current news for enhanced search and browseability of content.
- Design an eye-catching website where locals can advertise their small businesses.
- Establish SEO foundations for future growth and leverage organic search traffic.
- Implement a fully responsive solution backed by WordPress CMS.
My role
As a freelance designer, I worked at TCM as their advertising designer. I was asked to help with website design in January 2021. I was in a team of two, me and a developer IT person. We worked hours tirelessly to publish the website by the end of March 2021. I was doing the design of the newspaper, the ads design, helping with the development of the site and after publishing, I kept the website up to date until September 2021.
Prototyping
Town Common Media (TCM) is one of the oldest local newspapers in the town Rowley. Brings together so many stories, focusing on the positivity and upbringings of the local events. It is a weekly newspaper, printed for all the towns in North Shore and In Coastal New Hampshire.
The challenge was to carry the newspaper look throughout the website, adding features that make it easy for the readers to interact.
I conducted research in other newspapers, locally like the town of Newburyport and Lynn newspaper and nationally like the Globe, the Washington Post, etc.
Based on the target audience, we designed pages that have organized content, separated into paragraphs or in frames. The newspaper hired a new photographer specifically for the site to take pictures for all the articles. We tried incorporating as much imagery and videos as possible.
The menu bar information architecture is purposefully shown throughout the bar. The goal of this site is to make it easy for the readers to find articles they like to read. Although it looks crowded, the menu bar has been tested to have a positive impact and cause less confusion for the readers.
Style Concepts
TCM has branding guidelines that I needed to follow for this website design. I and my team were focusing on creating a responsible, visually attractive, user-centered website.
The Homepage features a banner at the top where an ad is going to take place. Purposely the first thing you see as this will be the most expensive ad. The articles are clearly split from one another, where the most important news is featured in the middle with the biggest image and largest font. To the right are paid advertising and to the left are secondary articles.
Community News page design, expanded version
TCM is a newspaper that brings together communities. The articles talk about local people, businesses, events. Everything is well organized and structured for the readers wherever they are. This website redesign went from being a pdf based website to a total digital newspaper design. The number of viewers raised significantly from the first month to the fourth month. The traffic is organic since the social media of the newspaper is not active. There are also, new subscribers to their newsletter.
Thank you for building such a beautiful news website. It is clean, easy to read, and navigate. You are making such a difference for our little community news outlet.
Stewart Lytle
Author at TCM
by Eriola Kapaj | Mar 13, 2022
Challenge
1 logo 6 renewable energy sources
Tufts CREATE Solutions needed a logo for their research department. The logo has to show all sources of renewable energy combined together.
How do we design a logo with 6 elements that will look good in print, web, and different sizes?
Solution
Staying organic
The concept for this logo included lots of shapes and details, like solar panels and wind turbines. For this logo to be successful needed to have small details within a limit, so when it shrank in size will still be able to tell different renewable energy sources.
Sketch of the final Create Solutions logo
Logo Development
Sketch & explanation
It was easy to draw the sources of renewable energy but how do we put them in harmony with each other in a logo! After lots of brainstorming and inspiration mood boards, my team, at Tufts Uni and I decided on a circular logo with all elements within the circle and the titles around the outline.
Logo design
Designing in Sketch
My responsibility in the team was to illustrate the logo from scratch. We had discussed my sketches and on this stage I had to illustrate the logo digitally.
The elements presented were:
Sun
Wind Turbent
Tree
Solar Panel
River
Leafs
The first concept was the illustration of all elements. Negative space plays a huge role in this illustration but since this logo, is used in an education department, was better to not leave space for interpretation.
First concept was developed into a more bold and more detailed illustration. This was the final logo design.
Find the final logo design here.
Added text to the final concept will only be used in certain situations, mostly print.
Create Solutions logo mockup
Logo design
Color version
The color palette was inspired by the renewable energy sources color palette. The colors are realistic and bright. This logo is used in a research department for the global warming crisis and therefore, needed to be happy and bright to show the positive impact of these resources on the earth.
Logo 3D design
3D design
Pushing further this logo design by exploring how 3D elements would look in the colorful version. It is really interesting to see how reflections, gradients, and shapes give a different feeling to it.
This version of the logo was designed in Illustrator (Ai).
CREATE SOLUTIONS 3D concept
Tufts Create Solutions logo mockup design
Challenge
Design a logo for Ames Hotel
Ames Hotel is located in Vlore, Albania. The client hired me to design a logo for his hotel. The client provided the name of the business, and that he envisioned it to be a minimalistic/artistic logo. He was open to colors/fonts/shapes.
Solution
A minimalistic/artistic logo
When thinking of a hotel/building, my first thought is basic geometric shapes rectangular, triangle, square. And for the artistic side, wanted to include stars.
Logo Development
Sketch & explanation
Sketching helps my creativity flow. A paper to me is a canvas where I can create anything I envision. You will find me sketching when I am talking to my clients because most of my good ideas come from conversations with them.
The letter A and H are interacting with one another, where H is almost hiding between the straight lines that form the letter A. These letters have a geometric design, inspired by the architecture of the hotel (like a skyscraper only not as tall). The four stars, forming a “crown” on top, enlarging from left to right to give a sense of depth to the logo. Four stars because it is a 4 star hotel.
Logo design
Designing in Ai
The second step is designing the logo in illustrator (Ai). This is an important step because I transfer my sketch to a digital design and I can see better how it will look in real life. The challenging part was the space between the stars and the shape of the letter A. Thank the pen tool and pathfinder, I created this design.
Logo design
Finalizing small details
Logo introduction
Client Talk
I sent my international client a pdf with all the logo ideas for this project. Walked the client through all the stages of the design, sent him sketches, mockups and he loved this design. Hooray!!!
AMES Hotel business card mockup
AMES Hotel logo mockup design
