Elevated Computing

Elevate your IT

Elevated, an IT firm, was tired of their old site. They hated nearly everything about it, but mostly they felt it was hurting their business. The thing Elevated has going for them that makes them better than all the other IT companies out there is their level of customer service. That and, unlike most IT companies, they are not vendor specific and will use whatever products work best for their clients. Add that to 24/7 customer support and offices distributed across the United States (which allows for faster response times), and they truly are a head above the rest. They wanted a site that better reflected what made them stand out.

Features

Their only constraint was that it had to be a one-page, parallax site. I convinced them that they also needed a new identity, so we started there, and finished up with a new, fully responsive site built in WordPress and a whole mess of Javascript. We also built a dual navigation system that lets users move through the site in either a traditional way, via a header nav, or chronologically with little banners that drop down at the bottom of each section.

Capabilities

Art Direction

Branding

Site Design

User Interface

User Experience

New identity

We convinced Elevated that if they really wanted to revamp their brand, they needed to start with their identity—which looked like it had been designed back in the ’90s. For the first round of new identities, Andy and I came up with three initial ‘buckets’ under which we fit three taglines and quite a few visual concepts.

We presented computer roughs, but kept them black and white, hoping that would help them focus on concepts rather than content.

Further refinement

For the next round, I explored several of the visual concepts the client liked from the first round, as well as some new ideas we had to fit the tagline. I focused on refining the icons and explored different typefaces that I felt would complement the icons.

Final color

Once the client landed on one of the concepts from the second round, I moved into color exploration. These are just a few of the many, many combinations I tried. I only wanted to show the client color palettes I felt fit the objective of a professional firm in a technical field that was easy to work with. I limited what I showed the client so the options wouldn’t be overwhelming.

The site

Once an identity was settled on, I moved on to the website. Because of a smaller budget, I didn’t have the luxury of really exploring content and functionality through wireframes and user flows, so I limited our interaction exploration to two simple wireframe options and a site map that helped us plan out the majority of the site before we moved into developing content and design.

We ended up with a parallax, one-page site that has some interesting little touches. The line and circle graphics move on different levels, at different speeds as the user scrolls through the site. Each section has a banner that alerts the user to the next section that will load as they scroll. Users can navigate using the more traditional nav bar, or chronologically using the banners.