Check out our new website, hot off the digital presses! Have you ever wondered what it’s like behind the scenes when a marketing firm markets for themselves?

Our design and development team has crafted countless websites for organizations large and small. In doing so, project by project, our designers mastered new tools and kept up on the latest trends.

So, when turned loose to create our own new website, the team was excited to use everything at their disposal. Art Director and Webmaster Cynthia Hartness recalls that the drive to redo Imagine’s website began after she’d finished a client’s website using some new interactive tools.

“I still wanted more work!” she joked.

At the same time, we had to avoid the kitchen-sink approach, where a website is bursting at the seams to accommodate every bell and whistle. Alex Raffi, owner and creative director, along with Hartness, decided that for this brand update we would all step back and treat ourselves like a client. That meant not having the whole team involved, and only showing leadership the progress on the new campaign at determined intervals.

“It was sort of weird, for a collaboration-based team,” Hartness recalled. “But we had to dial things back, or else we’d have too many cooks.”

Hartness worked closely with Designer Montana Black and Account Director Bobby Long. They employed a structured approach in order to keep the voice consistent and avoid having the process veer into a series of brainstorms.

“Elevating the brand was the mission,” Long said. “We started by looking at analytics. How are people using the site? And how are others showcasing themselves?”

Branding from the inside can be very challenging. Being our own client meant we were all hyper-familiar with the subject. That familiarity can result in seeing things as a Gestalt image, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and no approach seems quite right. You end up in an endless loop of improvements, striving for (but never reaching) perfection.

“Branding something you’re really close to is so hard,” Hartness said. “You see too much. That’s why I’ve never painted portraits of my children.”

In the process of getting out of that box, we employed a few psychological tricks to isolate our new brand voice and keep it consistent (stay tuned for details on those techniques in a future blog). Happily, we met the twin goals of getting it right and getting to the finish line. The result is, we hope, the best representation of Imagine yet.