Trend Setting Design » blogging

Guest Blog at Live Awake

Joseph Cotten — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:41:00 +0000

My brother is a full-time pastor, as well as a web designer. He runs a great blog called Live.Awake, over at www.bencotten.net. He’s doing a blog series entitled A Pastors Guide to the Web. It’s a five part series, with the final portion penned by me. He asked me to weigh in with the pastors and other readers from the perspective of a full time designer.

Things are pretty busy ’round here, but I found the time tonight to share my thoughts on the modern Christian church and how graphic design is being mishandled, as well as what should be done about it. Check it out!

Moriah Guitars Blog

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:09:50 +0000

This was a great project because I’m Moriah’s first customer. This is a new guitar builder, but the guys running it have been making guitars for at least 30 years. They had another company years ago, Zion Guitar Technology, but sold it when business slowed and moved on to other carpentry. Now they’ve reopened shop under a new name, and my custom electric guitar will be the first product off the line. When I came on board to help with their design, they already had a logo in place, and didn’t want to change it. Instead of creating a brochure style site, I went with a blog because of the potential they have to build a client base before the first guitar is finished. They are writing articles on why they love to build guitars, what makes their instruments so special, and laying a groundwork for a new way to think about guitars.

I chose a warm pallete with natural green accents to convey a sense of earthiness, natural processes and handmade craftmanship. It’s a somewhat minimalistic layout, letting the text and images shine, much in the same way that their instruments let the tone be forefront.

The guys at Moriah have really taken the ball and run with it on the site, creating interactive Biblical devotion areas and keeping fresh content on the site.

Wellspring Website and Blog

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:59:01 +0000

So for this project, my wife and I worked together to create both a static brochure-style website with a separate-but-unified blog. The static portion of the site has some interactive elements, like a user-controlled photo gallery and embedded videos. We created the videos on the site for various reasons, like special conferences and general promotion.

The blog is specially crafted to appeal to women, as Wellspring is targeted exclusively at women. The use of organic, swirling forms, a paper-like background, and a purposeful lack of “Read More” links were all elements that we put into the site for that reason.

I created the Wellspring logo and corporate identity a few months before we created the site. I also helped Wellspring by setting up their hosting service and registering their domain name.