Bill Kenney’s unyielding passion for design developed at a young age, and truly came to the forefront as he earned his BFA in Graphic Design at the University of Tampa. While a full-time student, Bill led large freelance projects which convinced him of the viability of a design career. Now, with nine years of professional experience, five as a business owner, Bill has developed both the design acumen and business knowledge necessary for success.
An advocate of clean, user-friendly design, Bill’s keen eye for detail has always defined his work. While his true passions are for branding and web design, his portfolio is not limited to a specific medium. The breadth of his designs has cultivated a deep understanding of the aesthetic requirements across media. Creativity, knowledge and experience inform all of his design decisions.
While design has always been his first passion, five years of business ownership have taught Bill a great deal about management, communication and organization. The value of networking isn’t lost lost on him either. For that reason, Bill is very involved in the professional design community both locally and nationally as a mentor and a student. While always happy to lend advice to new designers, Bill also realizes there is a great deal to learn from his peers. These community relationships help Bill to continually improve.
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A few months ago I stumbled across this video and got pretty excited. The coworking space the Focus Lab office is in had been looking to put on an event to engage members, and I realized this was exactly what we needed. I shared the link with a few people, and we were off and running with plans for the ThincSavannah Egg Drop.
The new year brought a more polished look for Focus Lab. Since 2011 was so great for us, we were excited and anxious to rework our website to spotlight new team members, refined service offerings and our latest portfolio of work. Although the the overall aesthetic is similar, the site is quite different in the details. In this post I will explain the new design changes and the reasoning behind them.
Well, it seems that our challenge, although tricky, was not hard enough to outwork the super sleuth team of Nick Benson and Than Thibbetts. They were the first person / team to successfully locate all 7 Monocle Men and provide the visual proof. A big hat-tip to them for their determination.
Here we are the end of 2011, and it has been an amazing year. It was great for us both in things that we learned as well as company growth. We wanted to take a minute to breathe and reflect on how it all went down, what we learned, and to share some insight and show some love.
Thanksgiving just got a whole lot better! We have 2 dribbble invites to give away and we are calling all turkeys to spread the word & wow us with your work.
We recently prepared a presentation for Geekend, a conference geared toward the young creative, technical and entrepreneurial demographics. The presentation entitled “Knowing is Half the Battle,” discussed what we feel are a few of the essential points to starting and maintaining a successful business. Over the past three years, we have learned countless lessons - both good and bad - and wanted to share part of our story and detail some of those lessons. Keep in mind this is told through the eyes of a designer and developer, neither of us considered ourselves “businessmen” when we started. Since we entered this venture with numerous blind spots, we now want to shine some light on what we have learned to help others who are going through the process.
We are happy to announce that we have 3 badges to this year's Geekend conference in Savannah and we are giving them away for FREE! We love to give back to our peeps while creating a fun “geeky” contest. In the end there will be 3 happy geeks going to a great event.
We were approached a few months back about working with a local startup to create a logo/branding package for their new venture called Run26Two. They knew they were onto a good idea and also understood that branding was crucial to the overall foundation of the company. I can honestly say there is nothing we like more than starting from scratch with just a name and some small initial direction from the client. The freedom of running loose with your creativity allows for maximum exploration and ultimately helps leads to a successful final product. We were able to have a very open dialogue with the client throughout the entire process and this was crucial to our success.
At what point did design take a turn from the clear and effective treatments that we saw in the modernist movement and turn into a mass-production of technology-reliant solutions full of gradients, bevels and unlimited fluff? Attention to detail has become attention to 35 different layer effects, and such reliance on software tricks is not good for our industry. As designers, it is our duty to create unique and effective visual solutions for our clients. To accomplish this we must constantly remind ourselves of the key framework within which we create, and carefully add new skills and thought processes upon that foundation.
One of our recent projects was to create a brand for a local colleague named Fitz Haile. He recently started his own company specializing in the areas of web development and social media technology. This branding post will cover the process of how we started without a company name and transitioned through the design phases to create a cohesive brand for him to build his company around.
We are at it again. Another branding project is in the books and we wanted to share the process. We were very excited to work on this project for the 1st annual Barcamp in Savannah, Georgia. Enjoy the read we’d love to hear your thoughts when you finish in the comments.
I recently came across a blog post by a colleague named David Bushell. His post titled “Design and Enjoy it” explores the dynamic we all face as designers in the vast world of talent, critique and accomplishment. In it, he talks about the roller coaster of creative acceptance, critique of your work and remaining positive throughout the process. After reading the post I was inspired to build off of his thoughts and inject some of my own.
Recently, we had the pleasure of taking on a branding project for the Savannah Soap Co., a unique laundromat here in Savannah. Branding a laundromat proved to be a unique and interesting task that provided challenges and opportunities for our creative expression. In this post I wanted to document all the the steps of the project including thought processes, version creation, color and final applications. Enjoy!
Now that we're settled into our fancy new website I wanted to take some time to share our experience of branding Focus Lab, LLC. Branding is a term used in a number of ways but today we're just going to look at our logo and our colors. Call me crazy because we moved into our new office with a new name and new look, but I decided to change it again. Here I will break down the process of why this decision was made, how we moved through the design process and where we are now.