Cordelia Smythe is the ficticious namesake of a murder mystery dinner party company based in northern California. When we were contracted to redesign their ecommerce website, we knew we had to emphasize this special character.

We spent a lot of time with the client hashing out the content, design, and presentation of their website to ensure it matched the level of care and detail they put into all of their mysteries. In order to keep the process fast and efficient, we utilized CodePen to rapidly iterate through ideas.

The first deliverable we worked on was the Brand Profile. Since we were reusing the majority of the content from the old design, this step gave us an opportunity to define the building blocks for the rest of the elements in the design. Using the brand profile, we created mockups for some of the primary content components—like telegrams, postcards, and notes—as well as a full-page mockup for an individual mystery feature.

Iterating through these pieces in a dependency-free environment like CodePen kept us focused on the task at hand, and made sure we weren’t getting caught up in too many distracting details. Our goal for the design was to pull the user into the world of Cordelia Smythe before they received their murder mystery. We think we captured Cordelia’s spirit well, and the client was thrilled with the result.

The requirements for this project were pretty simple: show some pictures, provide a description, and link some documents. We took those simple requirements and ran with an idea to create something that looked like an ad you might see in a newspaper, relying on a clearly defined layout to section the information.

The lot is no longer for sale, but we still have the site available for viewing at the below link.

It’s always a treat to be involved in a couple’s wedding planning. For Haleigh and Sean, we worked with them to design a site that incorporated their colors and theme. The design is simple and understated, placing emphasis on the content and storytelling. This simplicity played an important role in ensuring the site was accessible by users (family and friends) of all ages, as well as a wide range of devices.

Lori has been a family friend for nearly a decade, so we were thrilled when she asked us to design her photography studio’s website. Her beautiful photography is featured heavily throughout the site, of course, but we focused most of our attention on the admin panel.

Making sure Lori had the tools and interface necessary to keep the site current was a very important goal during our process. We worked closely with Lori to understand her ideal workflow, and used a combination of built-in WordPress functionality and extra plugins to craft an editing experience that would be as delightful as her pictures.

Empowering clients to feel confident in their website is an important objective of ours. We have a case study of the admin panel work available on Bobby’s blog.