A new site launch this week! 📣 Fearless Cooking is a cooking school and culinary store in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood. After COVID hit, owner Catherine Siebel pivoted all classes to virtual instruction and set up safe ways to shop. She’s introducing in-person classes and extended hours just in time for summer.

The original site was built in a mishmash of platforms, so we moved everything over to Shopify. Design-wise, we made the site’s look and feel much cleaner, bringing upcoming classes front and center and making the checkout process much more straightforward. If I still lived in Chicago, you better believe that my kids would be going to the cool summer camps they have coming up.

Charlie Carter is a Seattle-based lawyer whose primary focus is advising startups. During his 25-year career, he has formed hundreds of companies, advised through financing, growth, and sale transactions. His business approach is guided primarily by his own personal values of truth, connection, renewal, empathy, commitment, and action. He’s found that when these values align with his clients, magic happens.

He decided this was the year to go out on his own and start his own business. We designed the site with beautiful imagery from the Pacific Northwest and kept the copy tight and concise with clear calls to action. Included are enthusiastic testimonials and links to current and former clients. Learn more about Charlie and his work here.

Taylor-Smartt is a Texas-based real estate and holding company with a diverse portfolio of businesses. Included is everything from McCraw Oil to the convenience store Kwikchek to Two Hot Mamas salsa. This site introduces each entity and demonstrates the values which bind the each company together. Check it out here.

Christina Loff has done marketing work for some of the most interesting people (Snoop Dogg! DOLLY PARTON!!!) and innovative companies like Wikia, Minted, Chronicle Books, and Hello Lucky. The obvious next step was branching out on her own and founding a marketing and publicity business.

Christina wanted a brightly colorful site with punchy copy. The result is a compact site (built in Squarespace) that’s both minimal and bold at once. You quickly learn about Christina’s impressive capabilities and work, with a clear path to connection.

My first major site launch of 2021 was close to my heart— Dream Chicago. This Chicago-based nonprofit starts the conversation by asking, “What’s your dream?” The responses fuel a program that brings art programs and opportunities to underserved populations through a dynamic group of artists, dancers, photographers, and writers.

Design-wise, we had a lot of fun, introducing a lot of animation, bright colors (inspired by Chicago’s flag!) and playful fonts. We invited interaction with the Dream Map, where visitors could submit dreams and see them populated on the map.

Founder and Executive Director Heather Treadway said: “I’m so INFINITELY grateful to have discovered you–I began 2020 with my broken foot, followed by a pandemic and more seemingly broken professional and creative dreams…yet hearing your story of recovery (from the same injury, nonetheless), working with you to make our virtual home / website more real and welcoming, and then finding out you have a background in books as I’m trying to realize that dream as well…it just all seems to good to be true. So 2020 is the year I discovered Lisa, and that is something worth celebrating and marveling about!”

The site I designed for Healthcare Services Acquisition Corp launched just before its December 22nd IPO. HCAR is led by investors, operators and leaders in the healthcare space. The site introduces the company, demonstrates its proven track record in the healthcare industry, and shows its viability for future investors. We used Squarespace as the platform to make it easy to launch a robust site on a short deadline. Check it out here: healthcarespac.com.

HRGi is a company focused around reducing costs and regaining control in the medical industry. Offerings include medical cost containment, pharmaceutical cost optimization, and claims reconciliation and analysis. While they further refine their messaging and prep for their official relaunch, we designed this site to tease the offerings and invite interested parties to learn more. This preliminary site was designed to help establish its search engine footprint, tease company offerings and invite engagement from users. We used a page flip scroll to share the content in a visually appealing way and bold graphics to highlight the messaging. Check it out at: hrgi.com. 

Leslie Jonath is one of the most intuitively creative people I have ever met, so of course it was an utter delight to collaborate with her on her site redesign. Years ago, she founded Connected Dots Media, an agency devoted to bringing creative content to life. The redesigned site shows the variety of beautiful projects she has created, particularly in the world of art and design, cooking, garden, and children’s publishing.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Sourcerock LP, an equity fund using fundamental research to invest within the energy ecosystem. We wanted to show off the strengths of this fund through copy, charts, and imagery, giving potential investors the information they need to jump onboard.

We just launched the site for McCraw Oil & Propane, an energy company with branches in Texas and Oklahoma. For this project, we brought the separate oil and propane sites together under one URL with a new design. Customers can place orders directly from the site, learn about energy-saving opportunities, and learn about the company and career opportunities.
 
The biggest challenge was combining a LOT of content, while making it all easily navigable. We used tiered navigation and broke the content into digestible blocks with lots of cross-links.