From dense data to storytelling: NMWF came to us with a dense report, filled with data, on the elk tag distribution in New Mexico. They needed help making the information more digestible and easy to access for everyone. We prepared a reader-friendly report, adding photos and infographics, highlighting important information, and breaking the information up into chunks that could easily convey the big message. (See full report).

This was a highly collaborative project as we worked for weeks with staff at NMWF and other stakeholders to review information, confirm data structures, and finalize the tone and language of this report. We knew we were done when we could ask someone to flip through the report and they could outline the key points of the report after reading:
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1. Elk are the most valuable big game in New Mexico
2. There are quota laws that dictate how elk tags are allocated to licensed hunters. 
3. Though 84% of tags should be allocated to NM residents through the public draw, only 52% are making it to the public draw after the rest are privatized.
4. In this structure, NM residents are missing out on their right to hunt through the public draw as more out of state hunters purchase tags from private landowners for a higher price. 

For an author with an upcoming book launch, the book page is one of the most important on the site. The Cavalier book page introduces potential readers to the book and gives more information than is normally available in the description on sales platforms like Amazon. 

The process started before I first met Connie, familiarizing myself with the story. Connie's true-crime memoir, Cavalier, The Story of An Unsolved Murder In a Small Town, shares the story of her friend's death, and suspected murder. Though I did not read the whole manuscript, I started on the first page and kept reading until I felt I had a good sense of this story.

​The next step was meeting Connie, getting to know more about her and her hopes for the book and its style. After gathering ideas, motifs, and imagery that might be used, I set out to create a few samples that could guide our next step.  

Connie chose the most minimal cover design, featuring a snowy backdrop, a scene she felt captured the setting well and conveyed the sense of mystery surrounding this cold case. 

From there, it was a matter of making adjustments based on Connie's feedback, with multiple updates to text, positioning, and colors used on both the front and back cover. This was a back-and-forth process that spanned a couple weeks as the manuscript was finalized and final changes were made. Just before the final approval, Connie asked for a pop of color, and I added in a crimson red color we had worked with, adding it as a frame on the front cover and making it the color for the spine. I think this will make the book stand out on any bookshelf and gives the cover a good amount of energy to combat the somber grey colors throughout. 

See the final cover below!

Working on this cover was a lot of fun! It was a big responsibility and I appreciate Connie's trust.

​-Janet

We started our work with Elva, the owner of Dulce Vita Facials with a goal of creating a brand identity and redesigning her website. Elva is a licensed esthetician who empowers her clients through facial treatments, helping them look and feel their best. After a few meetings with Elva, it was evident that she had a clear vision for her business but it wasn't fully being conveyed through her current website. Also, after visiting her location we noticed the lack of branding—something that is very important for clients to recognize your business and make the connection. So, with this in mind we got to work!

The Process:

More than just a name
When we started out with Elva, she let us know that although she primarily does facials and skincare treatments, she would also want to potentially sell her own products in the future. With this in mind, we felt that the name Dulce Vita Facials was a bit limiting for her because she offers so many other services that are not encompassed in 'facials'. It was almost immediate that we thought of replacing 'facials' with 'skincare', to have a new name of Dulce Vita Skincare. This new but similar name seemed to fit where she is now, and where she wants to take her business in the future. 

New Website
With the other brand pieces in place, we could really get going on the new website. We normally build our sites in Weebly but tried something new by using Square's online website builder. Square seemed like a more strategic option for a number of reasons. Elva currently utilizes the Square point-of-sale system for her business so it would be a platform and interface that she would already be familiar with. Also, Square's platform has a more sophisticated ecommerce and customer management system with their base package, and since her long-term goals included selling product we figured that it would make sense to set her up on this initially so that she wouldn't have to upgrade or move in the future. Lastly, she was interested in creating an online booking area that would be easy to manage. Square's system is straightforward and links seamlessly with the site and the POS system.

Although Square was a great choice for those reasons, it gave us a few design challenges along the way. It didn't have as many design features as we were used to on Weebly, and wasn't as customizable as we would have liked, but we pressed on and we were able to achieve the site we wanted.

Elva's old site's color scheme was primarily white and a light purple, and she wanted her new site to have the same feel. We went with different shades of this rich lavender you see in the photo above, using the darkest shade for the text. We also used a bit of a pastel blue and a background image of a cream moisturizer that added some texture and depth to the pages.

Elva had lots of content for us to work with so we tried to keep the aesthetic clean so that it wouldn't look cluttered or overwhelming. We broke up some of the text on the Specials and Treatments pages with colorblocked sections that could help with navigation. We also added anchor links to certain sections of the longer pages so that clients could easily jump to the section they were interested in. 

Since Elva is very much at the heart of Dulce Vita, we wanted to make sure she was a focal point of the website and that people were able to get to know her. We featured her welcoming headshot and short bio on the homepage and then expanded on it on the About page. We had Elva do a full photoshoot with photographer Tira Howard, which resulted in tons of really great photos of Elva in action and headshots to choose from. 

Lastly, we purchased the URL dulcevitaskincare.com to match her new name and had her previous URL dulcevitafacials.com forward to the new one so that there is no confusion. 

Social media is a great tool to both express yourself creatively and professionally! Part of what we do is help our clients get a message to their audience. We've had the pleasure of working with Carrie Ishee, a licensed clinical counselor, art therapist, trauma recovery coach, and award winning author. Carrie's book "Seduced into Darkness: Transcending my Psychiatrists Sexual Abuse" is a moving memoir detailing the trauma that she experienced in her early twenties.

We have been working on developing Carrie's social media presence on both Instagram and Facebook. Each month we plan different topics that she is interested in and could be engaging for her audience and then we use this as a roadmap for her content. We help her create the connection between the work she is doing as a therapist and author, and her overarching goal of empowering others and helping them through their own healing journeys. Along with messaging, we have helped her develop a color palette that matches her website and book cover that we use throughout her social media to keep a cohesive look. We have been playing around with different types of content like reels and timelapse videos, which are really fun and help keep her audience interested.

We are so happy that we can help Carrie express herself through social media!

The Centers for Growth and Potential is a group of professionals who specialize in providing a wide range of traditional psychological assessment and psychotherapy services. They are a warm and professional team so we wanted to redesign their website to reflect that. The first thing we did was review their old site and get a clear picture of who they are and what they do. Once we had a sense, we decided to rebrand the logo and color palette for a more warm and natural look that would compliment the website. 

The overall theme of the site is simple, and clean. They had a variety of information to present so it was important to make sure that was the focal point, and that the design wouldn't take away from all that they do. Take a look at their new and improved site!

The Youth Symphony has many students and groups that needed to be showcased throughout this program. We chose a color-blocking layout that allowed us to feature a lot of text on each page by breaking it into sections and integrating photos. We worked with using different opacities of color backgrounds, and photos with color overlays to create some dimension between pages. 

Projects like this allow us to really work on problem solving—mainly how to get all the information on the page in a way that is visually appealing, and easy to read. This project was fun, challenging, and rewarding. I was really happy to see how it all came to life on the pages.

Flip through a digital copy of the program below to see for yourself!

Nacha Mendez, Santa Fe musician and winner of the New Mexico Platinum Music Lifetime Achievement Award, decided to start her own scholarship to support young girls in their musical education. The Nacha Mendez Music Scholarship for New Mexican Girls of Color was an idea Nacha's brother planted in her ear as they reflected on her career as a musician and she made it a reality this summer. In preparation for the launch, we worked with Nacha to prepare a unique logo that could capture the essence of her mission.

About the scholarship:
The first two awards will be awarded in January of 2022, given to girls ages 8-15. The scholarships will be unrestricted so that funds can be applied where the need is greatest—music lessons, instrument purchase, travel expenses, or any cost that is essential to supporting access to learning.

Having learned first hand what an impact music can make in one's life and how important access to music education is, Nacha hopes to support the next generation of female musicians in her community. 

2.0
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I LOL-ed at Nacha's email response (I'm still laughing!! :D) and got back to work to make the abstract guitar shape more "mountain-like" and less "fried-egg". I created a mountain silhouette free-hand on my drawing tablet and tried adding a Zia symbol like she suggested. I sent a few more options. One was even vertical. 

3.0
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Nacha really liked the horizontal version (left), so I worked on refining this version and creating the final color options for her to choose. 

4.0
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After Nacha picked a color version, we actually had one final update: adding some dimension to the guitar by making the to curve thicker.

The Project:
We had the opportunity to work with a New Mexico-based non-profit organization called Stop Forever WIPP Coalition. Their mission is simple: stop the expansion of New Mexico's nuclear waste dump site, WIPP—an acronym for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant . This group is passionate about the safety of New Mexico and protecting its future, and we were very interested in how we could help them propel their message. 

We took a slightly different approach than usual and focused on acting as consultants for the group. We did a deep dive into all their marketing and communication materials: website, newsletter, social media, logo, messaging, etc. and analyzed what we thought was working/wasn't. We decided that their overall brand needed some updating, and we would start with re-working their logo. We also went through all their newsletters and gave specific notes regarding design style and content messaging.

We compiled all this information into a multi-page report outlining our recommendations. The report included a brand kit with the new fonts, colors, and logos that they could use going forward and a designed layout for their website homepage that they could implement. We also recommended that they move to a new email platform for sending newsletters so that they would have more design capabilities.

We finished off our work with the Stop Forever WIPP Coalition with a fundraising campaign. We created a series of campaign emails that were sent out over a two-week period to their contact lists. The campaign was both a fundraiser and a teaching tool that allowed us to leave them with campaign templates that they could customize and use for future campaigns. Below are images pulled from a few of the fundraiser emails that were sent.

The Project
Vanesa Nicolosi first worked with Angulo Marketing & Design 6 months ago to build her brand and setup a website for her personal training business. You can read more about that project here: Branding Strategy & Site Design. The site outlined her services of 1:1 training, both online, and in-person, pole fitness, flexibility classes, and even nutritional coaching.

Just a couple months ago, she came to us with an idea to take her business to the next level: she wanted to build a community online where she could share her health and fitness related contents. The ideal solution would allow her to use those recipes, workouts, and articles that she had prepared but never shared to create an even more accessible pricing model for people who just need some extra resources to get going on their fitness journey. 

The Work
The first step was to help Vanesa visualize how this project could branch off from her current site and how it would be mapped out. Starting from the content library she envisioned, I came up with the plan to create separate hidden blog pages that would house each of her content sections: Recipes, Workouts, and Articles. To make these pages easy to use, I added a blog organizer to the top of each page which would help visitors navigate the content easily, and also included buttons to the other content sections.

The blog pages could be enough to launch this project, but they didn't look like we wanted them to. We wanted something cleaner, more like a series of thumbnails that are easily visible at one glance. With this in mind, I created a landing page for this new project that would show a preview of the content in a nice, clean way. Vanesa ended up purchasing a Weebly app called Bloggons that allowed me to embed portions of her content blogs in sleek "blog cards" that show only the title of the content, the main image, and a button to see the full page. Here's what it looks like. ​

As we wrapped up the work of posting the content into the respective blog pages, it was time to manage the access to these pages and work on the membership aspect of the project. We wanted the "home" page of this new community to be visible to all, but the actual content should be made accessible only to members who signed up. To do this, we used Weebly's membership features as well as the PaidMembers app to manage accounts and set visibility limits for different pages of Vanesa's site. After all was said and done, we ended up with 1) a public home page promoting the membership, 2) a private home page with clickable content thumbnails, and 3) private blog pages of content that are only visible and accessible by logged in members. Leading up to the launch date of this project, Vanesa and I tested the site multiple times, checking for inconsistencies, missing pieces, and broken links. When everything was ready to go, we turned our focus to promoting and marketing the big reveal and launch.