Responsive schoool websites created with Hail
Whurd has it …
… this is my personal corner on the web. Here, you'll find a selection of my work, thoughts, travels and artistic ventures. So, grab a cup of your favourite brew, have a browse and get in touch if you're so inclined. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Design, Develop, Deliver: Giving 'em Hail
2014 – 2023
In my multifaceted role at Hail, a startup launched in 2014, I spearheaded the company's creative direction and digital strategy, while also diving deep into hands-on product development and management. As the Creative Director, I was pivotal in upholding the brand's quality and ensuring consistency across all visual and interactive elements. I seamlessly transitioned between roles, serving as the Product Designer and Frontend Developer, where I crafted the UI/UX and customer experience (CX) of the Hail app, including its publications. My responsibilities extended to writing copy and dialogues for every feature, the majority of blog posts, and all transactional and marketing emails.
You can browse some example publications created with Hail below:
As the Product Manager, I was instrumental in shaping the initial vision and roadmap, taking charge of the product's lifecycle from concept to launch, including onboarding, pricing, and upselling strategies. I led market research for growth and future features, converting ideas into actionable projects with detailed plans for design and development. This included ongoing alignment to ensure that every feature not only adhered to our high standards of innovation and user experience but also remained in sync with our overarching product strategy and market demands.
Hail's image browser from whiteboard to final UI/UX
My work as a Web Designer and Frontend Developer involved designing, developing, and maintaining the marketing site, ensuring a cohesive user experience that aligned with our brand identity. In quality assurance, I rigorously tested features across production and staging environments, maintaining very high standards of functionality and user satisfaction.
Landing page for non-profits
This comprehensive approach to project management, combined with my deep involvement in every aspect of the business, from design and development to marketing and customer engagement, underscores my capacity to lead and execute projects. Like all startups, there were some rocks along the road, but I'm proud of playing a major part in why Hail is NZ's favoured school communications platform.
Brand New on the Peninsula
October, 2023
Recently, I had the privilege of completeing a branding initiative for Clearwater Wildlife Tours during my tenure at Firebrand. This new venture, nestled in a private bay of the Otago Peninsula, required a brand identity that not only reflected its offerings but also embodied a sense of professionalism and commitment to ecological preservation. To achieve this, I opted for an illustrated logo because of its added visual appeal, authenticity and flexibility.
Logomark for Clearwater Wildlife Tours
The design carefully weaves together the forms of a yellow-eyed penguin, sea lion, and fur seal. This highlights their interconnectedness within distinct habitats, symbolising the diversity and harmony of wildlife in the region. Encased within a bubble, the logo gains strength, ensuring versatility across a spectrum of mediums — from digital assets like web and social media profiles to stickers and physical applications on large vehicle wraps. Moreover, the logo’s components can be pulled apart to highlight and support themed campaigns, ensuring the brand remains fresh and dynamic.
Branding for Clearwater Wildlife Tours
Ultimately, an illustrated logo of this nature can effectively communicate the company’s values, passion for nature, and commitment to providing exceptional wildlife experiences. It has the power to resonate with customers, ignite curiosity, and create a lasting impression.
Unifone’s Strategic Brand & Marketing Overhaul
July, 2023
During my time at Firebrand I was tasked with refining the brand and producing a marketing strategy for Unifone, a key provider of internet connectivity in the Otago region, especially for the rural sector. I saw my mission as distilling the essence of Unifone's robust local ties and technical prowess into a brand identity that resonated with the community's heart. The strategy was to underscore their commitment to affordable, reliable service while revamping their image to reflect a modern, customer-centric approach. The end goal was an revamped brand that not only promised connection but also embodied the spirit of the South Island – grounded, resilient, and forward-thinking.
Brand Refresh for Unifone
For Unifone's brand elevation project, I delved deep into market analysis, segmenting the audience and developing detailed personas to inform the strategy. I conducted a thorough competitive landscape review, setting benchmarks that guided the brand refresh. Through comprehensive audits of Unifone's website and social media presence, I uncovered areas ripe for innovation. The outcome was a revitalized brand with updated key messaging, sleek web UI/UX mockups, and a cohesive strategy for digital, social media, and targeted advertising. Additionally, print, out-of-home and marketing collateral were explored to complement the digital efforts. Unifone now possesses a definitive guide — complete with actionable examples and a rollout plan for enhancing their brand's impact across all channels.
Marketing Strategy for Unifone
Revving Up Nostalgia
November, 2023
Let The Good Times Roll is a newly launched companionship driving sevice in Dunedin. I crafted the brand to capture the essence of fellowship and mobility. The brand identity was designed to strike a chord with its target audience — the elderly, differently-abled, and their caretakers. With a nod to the nostalgic 'good old days', the logo radiates fun, friendliness, and warmth through its cheerful vintage-inspired typography and a lively, approachable car illustration.
Branding for Let The Good Times Roll
The chosen colour palette balances vibrant warmth with the solidity of trust, ensuring the brand is perceived as both exciting and reliable. This branding serves as a beacon of joyful journeys, promising not just a service, but an experience where every trip is filled with stories and cherished memories.
A Vision for Hail
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love content management.
October, 2014
Content is King
Hail as a company and service grew out of a project at web and marketing agency Firebrand. From day one, I was responsible for many product management duties including writing, evolving and maintaining the product’s vision, as well as onboarding, pricing and upselling strategies. I led market research for growth and future features, converting ideas into actionable projects with detailed plans for design and development. This included ongoing alignment to ensure that every feature not only adhered to our high standards of innovation and user experience but also remained in sync with our overarching product strategy and market demands.
The vision
First, we need to look at how people access digital information and how that has changed. Then we try to extrapolate where it's going.
“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” — Wayne Gretzky
The change from websites to webpages
Originally we had Yahoo to navigate the early days of the web. It was a hand-curated directory of websites, not web pages. If you wanted news you went to Yahoo's news directory and that sent you to the front page of The New York Times, which you could then bookmark and check back on.
During this time brand was incredibly important for generating traffic.
Then along came Google which shifted the focus from websites to web pages. Search results were generated by an algorithm, not a hand-made and updated directory.
With Google, you're not sent to a homepage you're delivered directly to the page with the info you searched for.
Focus started shifting from quality brands to quality content.
Google changed everything, but navigating the web was still fundamentally a pull exercise in that you had to expend a lot of mental energy actively searching and browsing to find what you were looking for. But Google's indexing and algorithm have gotten stronger and smarter and we couldn't imagine anything better, until…
The change from webpages to stories
Suddenly along came mobile devices and navigating the web and content discovery quickly changed from pull to push. And who's the top dog of pushing content to us? Facebook! And of course Twitter, Instagram, Email, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat …
The public spends more and more time in Facebook and social media, trusting them more and more for our content discovery — dipping in and out of posts, stories, videos and back to our feeds.
Stories could be articles, Instagram pics, Facebook and Twitter updates etc.
Social rules all
So, from Yahoo to Google to Facebook, the homepage and brand have become increasingly sidelined. It's still important for now to have a branded website but for many, it's simply a publishing archive, marketing face and trusted source for contact details.
Nothing interesting happens on your website — that's all going on in social circles.
We've seen with our own clients what they value the most is an easy-to-use publishing spout that allows them to push content to social channels. Many of them are increasingly content to create individual branded articles and publish those — completely independent of their website or larger newsletters/ publications.
They simply want to get the word out. If it wasn't for Hail, these early adopters would often be publishing their photos and stories exclusively to Facebook — effectively giving away all their content. See my blog article, Don't build on rented land. In contrast, Hail empowers them to retain and own their content while publishing to multiple channels.
So where is all this going?
People are both inherently lazy and social. Plus, we love being spoonfed — why else would they call it a 'social feed'. So I think push is here to stay, at least until there's some other mechanism for content delivery/discovery that's even easier. Most likely the only big changes we'll see in the near future are the expansion of devices that we get content pushed to, for example, smart home hubs/appliances, VR/AR/wearables and the inevitable death and birth of individual social platforms as traction wanes and grows.
Being that Hail is all about telling your stories and getting them out across platforms, we can be incredibly confident in its product-market fit. We've seen again and again the way customers and their communities take to Hail and how it fulfils a serious communications need.
Gary Larson Wannabe
Basically, my attempt at a Far Side 🙃 and bringing my passions together. My first love was science and I grew up sketching sharks, completing a Zoology degree before pivoting to the arts.
Cartoon: illustrated with Procreate on iPad
I also have a love of science fiction 👽🎬
Cartoon: illustrated with Procreate on iPad
iPhone 4S: the S was for Scratchin'
They say, 'The best camera is the one you have with you' and I still remember how thrilling it was to snap away whenever something unexpected happened, like when my youngest first discovered her inner Buffalo Gal back in 2014.
Early iPhone Photography