Catalyst Marketing Company was created in 2010 when two companies, Thielen Idea Corp and the Astone Agency merged, both long-established, advertising agencies headquartered in the City of Fresno.

When I came on board in May of 2011, I was tasked with creating a modern website that encompassed the core attributes of this newly merged company. I chose a WordPress approach allowing each key member of the agency to post recent projects within their personal blogs on the website. They could also blog about important issues facing our clients, the ad industry, even the State of California. Using the latest widgets,the site would also automatically display the most recent Tweets from Twitter regarding any of our clients we are handling the social media and communications for, plus the website would be easier to maintain and update with greater SEO capabilities.

While somewhat understated, compared to where blogs have been evolving, my design still had to bring the best of “two” former rival ad agencies into one fully integrated marketing company website.

For the pages to highlight our areas of expertise, I wanted to bring some human elements into the design and did so by creating the category header images below with self-generating type for the headline/category captions. Each would feature something specific to the category. The photo used in the middle layout was from our 2011 TV branding shoot for Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino and captured the feeling of “Gaming” expertise.

Along with this visual approach was the need to develop a unified design technique that allowed us to present diverse client logos in a specific format to represent category experience. These would also serves as visual links to their corresponding case study pages. I accomplished the unifying factor by creating a white image frame and slight drop shadow. This design would be used throughout the website on varied size images, but always with the same thickness of white framing.

This is how one of the pages would look composed together with category expertise header photo and logos of clients we have worked for in a particular category. One of these categories is for “builders and developers”, which I am very passionate about was most fortunate to be able to add McCaffrey Homes as a client and two of their developments; Braden Court and Crownstone, both in the master planned community of Loma Vista in Clovis, shortly after joining CatalystMC in May of 2011.