OUR WORK
Smith Design:
Designing for Designers
Smith Design is a packaging and branding design firm that’s been around for over 30 years, but their website hadn’t kept up with the advancements, updates, and successes over that time. They approached e9 for a new website that embraced their success and their new office space, but still celebrated their roots.
Helping designers design what they want
For Smith, a website that showcased the breadth of their capabilities, their past success, and that would be easy to update was a top priority. The new aesthetic needed to be fresh, but also nostalgic. The team worked closely with Smith, paying close attention to details, to arrive at the perfect look.
Designing for designers
“It’s great to work with such an experienced team who was able to bring our vision to life.”
MARK ERRICHETTI | Senior Production Mgr
Designers are quite the meticulous bunch—something even the designers at e9 will admit! Arriving at the final aesthetic took time, patience, and a lot of creativity. Smith has a wide variety of clients, and a generic template just wouldn’t do. To accommodate this, the team created a mosaic-style layout to showcase the case studies for the different brands. The mosaic is structured to be flexible and unique for each brand. For instance, if a product needs a vertical, horizontal, or another layout to best display it, Smith can change the mosaic to accommodate.
The importance of “why”
When e9 and Smith started this project, it was unclear what the final outcome would be. Smith brought a lot of ideas to the table but still had a “once we see it, we’ll know it’s right” sense of openness. The team presented several style options over the span of the project: modern and clean, nostalgic, image-heavy, and more. After several rounds of creative, the story of Smith Design finally came to life through a sophisticated, yet inviting, look with a crafty, and organic aesthetic. Finally, they had a website that set them apart (something their name hadn’t been doing for them!).
Because Smith is primarily a packaging design firm, the rounds of creative the team developed turned into an opportunity to teach Smith the best practices of web design. It was important to explain the “whys” of the design decisions the team made, and go deep into the strategy of e9’s work. Smith learned how to work within the structure of their new website, and e9’s team learned how to push that structure to its limits.
