When I started my business 16 years ago (!!!), I was lucky to land best-selling author Sara Paretsky right out of the gate. Sara has published more than two dozen books over her prolific career, and is credited with transforming the mystery genre with her female private eye protagonist, V.I. Warshawski.
This week, I launched the fourth redesign of Sara’s site, showing off her impressive body of work. On the homepage, we used portraits of Sara from legendary photographer John Loengard. We complemented these with gritty, sepia-tinted street shots of Chicago, where her characters regularly inhabit.
Her entire catalog of books are available to browse, as is her blog, which addresses everything from politics to personal musings. I’m delighted how the site turned out and even happier to work with the amazing, inspiring Sara over these years.You can find the site here.

This site launch for all my publishing people! I created Book Landing Pages as an affordable, effective and engaging way for authors to promote their books.
I’m passionate about books—authors, agents, and publishers are consistently my favorite clients. I created this service because (frankly) there are so many lousy book sites out there. Or there’s no site at all—ceding Google results to Amazon or external reviews. This approach helps authors boost sales, marketing and search engine indexing to help their books soar.
Follow the link below for more info.

So happy to announce the rebrand and site redesign for the Chicago-based investment firm, HPA. Their work with emerging startups in a wide variety of industries have made them the leading early-stage investor in the Midwest. We started with logo rebrand and let that exercise set the tone for the site redesign. HPA wanted to focus on the founders, members and partners who define their community, so we restructured the site structure correspondingly. We balanced subtle animation with clean fonts and colors to keep the site friendly and easy to browse. Perhaps most importantly, we configured WordPress strategically to make the site a breeze to update, so we can keep the momentum of the relaunch going. Check it out at the link below!

Boardified is a Chicago-based organization dedicated to helping Jewish nonprofit organizations build and strengthen leadership skills. Their team has developed a suite of customizable tools, programming, and resources specifically designed to help nonprofit boards optimize their talent. When designing this type of site, it’s essential to help visitors quickly digest the content and drill down to learn more. We used a minimalist design with a bold pop color, and tightly-written copy so the site was easy to browse. Subtle animations and transitions add a bit of playfulness to the design. www.boardified.org

ScoreSwag is a site that connects college athletes with brands like Garnier, Audible, Disney, Redbull, Clif Bars, and Axe to help promote their products. The site itself was designed by Adrienne Weiss Corp, but the build and HubSpot integration was handled by our team. This site provided a unique challenge in terms of how to build and track users, and organize the information in a useful way. We also created a user portal where athletes can log in and see which deals are currently available, and which they’ve already claimed.

Jodi Davis Warshaw has acquired, edited, and published more than 200 books over her career. This year, she decided it was time to strike out on her own. We built jwedits.net to not only showcase the wide array of books she has worked on over the years, but to show the various services she offers. Also crucial was integrating the enthusiastic endorsements she has received from authors. We built the site in Squarespace with bold colors against a white background, allowing the book covers to stand out. I’m so happy with how it turned out!

Luly Fatmarani is one of the most in-demand estheticians in the competitive Los Angeles beauty scene. I recently helped Luly launch the site for her new Santa Monica salon, Lulylashbeauty. We used lush, bold imagery to evoke the salon’s high-end services, integrated with the brand’s bold color palette. We built the site in WordPress, and integrated Vagaro for booking and payments. Check it out at the following link: https://lulylashbeauty.com/

Calling all San Franciscans! Wednesday Supper is now live, delivering one-pot meals with locally-sourced, seasonal ingredients. Founder Nicole Avril is a professionally trained chef, and her rotating menu is to die for (Agnolotti de Plin in Brodo! Chile Verde! Minestrone with Summer Squash and Ditilini!) We built the site in Shopify, making it easy to swap out weekly options and integrate with Mailchimp. One of the biggest challenges was restricting online orders to a specified delivery zone and managing inventory for subscription-based orders and individual orders. I’m thrilled with how it turned out! (But bummed I’m not in delivery range.) Click to visit! https://www.wednesdaysupper.com/

Another recent Shopify launch was the redesign of ASH + AMES. The company shifted its focus from trunk-show and ambassador-driven sales to direct-to-consumer. We created a site with bold product photography contrasted with a minimalist site design faithful to the branding. I love how easy Shopify makes it for customers to purchase online, offering a variety of options. For Black Friday, everything on the site is 30% off (calculated at checkout), so there’s no better time to grab that unique piece.

Replica is a Kansas City-based company that helps public agencies, land developers and communities synthesize data for urban planning. They needed the site to reflect their significant growth and demonstrate their services in a clear way. We migrated their existing site from Squarespace into a WordPress install. In terms of design, we leaned into their colorful data-driven maps and bold photography of bustling city scenes. This set the perfect backdrop for the copy.

Parallax scrolling adds visual interest and to help parse the content in a digestible way. Video is another tool we used to help tell their story. To help gain and track leads, we created attractive landing pages and calls to action so potential clients could easily request a demo and learn more. The contact points are integrated with Salesforce for follow-up.