When competing for attention on the shelves of big box stores, timid is not an option. If the consumer doesn’t grab your product within the first 3 seconds, they probably never will. Package design is often your one and only interaction that you have with potential clients.

Cooper Hunting Industries has contracted bighouse graphix to help brand their flagship product, The Chameleon Blind. The Chameleon blind is a portable, hunting blind that can be setup in less than 5 minutes, allowing a hunter to setup anywhere and in no time.

By incorporating the use of a bright and contrasting color palette along with bold fonts, this box design screams for attention. Custom illustrations provide for easy, at-a-glance setup instructions. Package design, sales slicks and a trade show exhibit are just a few of the branded pieces that bighouse graphix was responsible for.

Have a new product you are launching or one that just isnt quite getting the attention it deserves?  Give us a jingle.

With Fatwood Kindlin’ firestarter sticks, you can start fires in no time.  It’s true, these 8″ hand-split firestarter sticks start quickly with just the touch of a match, no mess, no chemicals, no hassle.  So for that special evening  when you would rather get cooking quicker or just want to get that fire going faster, use our Fatwood Kindlin sticks, she will love you for it.  So forget the fuss and get on with the fun, with Longleaf Lighter Company’s Fatwood Kindlin’.

But seriously, we had a real blast working with this client. bighouse was excited when called on to help rebrand this product from top to bottom.  From logo, packaging, content, web presence and social media, we hit the ground running at the opportunity.  This ecommerce site had challenges written all over it, featuring flash, PHP, javascript you name it. Because Kindlin’ is sold on both a wholesale and retail level, the site had to be developed to cater to both end users and reflect two pricing structures.

One of the most important things that the client required was control of their own site, allowing them to make edits and replace or add items, change pricing, etc.  This was accomplished by using Wordpress as our CMS platform and Cartweaver for the shopping cart features. The site even features ecommerce integration with the clients Quickbooks account, allowing automated order processing and hassle free online sales. Sales can be viewed in real time, batched immediately, providing a hands-free, no hassle ecommerce experience.  And of course to get the product out quicker to their customers, shipping integration with the fullfillment operation helped round out the entire site.

So give the site a visit and tell us what you think.

www.kindlin.com

Considering we never really know what’s  in our food, its good to know that All Natural Hardwood Lump Charcoal is just that, all natural. No chemicals, No additives, just natural charcoal, ala mother nature.

Then again, considering the philosophy and green practices of our longtime friend  Wood Products International, it’s no surprise to us that they chose this route.  Along with this product, they are also promoting the use of their All Natural Fatwood Firestarter stick. Are you seeing a trend here?

For the logo design and to maintain that clean, natural approach, we felt simpler is better.  Bright colors were used to draw the shoppers attention on the shelf, taking  advantage of  kraft paperstock that will serve as the packaging material for the bags. For the package design itself, we presented minimal use of illustration for the how-to steps.

We are also proud of the site design me put together as well. Take a look www.allnaturalcharcoal.com

The Savannah Philharmonic, formerly the Savannah Choral Society, is a community-based organization performing professional-quality live choral and orchestral music. Having recently restructured and expanded to include The Savannah Philharmonic Chorus and The Savannah Philharmonic Orchestra, the group found itself ready for an update to their identity. We were excited to take on the challenge (we actually designed their past logo, a sample can be seen here) The challenge was to develop three logos that worked together and have a common style, while at the same time be able to stand on their own visually.

Drawn to the concept of free-flowing brush strokes to show the creativity and the energy of the choral group, Zach used watercolor and acrylic paint to create a series of brush strokes representing a lyre and a conductor that were then scanned. Some digital editing was done combining several of the paint strokes in Photoshop. Then the image was imported to Adobe Illustrator with text applied. This finished logo was then incorporated into their new website and print collateral.

Although a few of the other samples may not have come to light for this project, a few below are ones we were proud of.

To round out the package we put together a CSS site, allowing staff to update the and edit their own site.  Let it free. Visit their new site and give us your thoughts. www.savphilchorus.org.

We are proud to launch the new site for Kenwood Management Company. Their site needed a much agreed upon redesign and we were happy to oblige.  Kenwood’s goal is to build client wealth through property investment and acquisitions.

For a design approach,  limited use of flash animations keeps the site interesting without having it too busy. In addition to a standard top navigation, the site features 3 large navigation buttons  to make the user experience even simpler, providing quick, at-a-glance navigation.

The geographic focus of Kenwood is the Washington, DC metro area and outlying cities.  We designed a handy little interactive flash map here which makes it easy for the user to locate their portfolio properties quickly.   Kenwood also has several properties for lease that are only listed through a 3rd party vendor website.  In order to keep the user on the Kenwood site rather than have them click a link and leave the site (and risk losing them), we incorporated this database site directly into the Kenwood site as you can see here.

www.kenwoodmgt.com

Phantasia’s Jewelry is “The Original $5 Jewelry Company.” This Richmond Hill based company offers affordable, high quality products and proven fundraising strategies. The project started with the redesign of an existing Web site with the addition of an online store featuring over 800 products.

Phantasia’s is Bighouse’s first e-commerce site. The site uses a mix of html, Flash and PHP in construction. Additionally, the site acts as a tool for fundraising. We also designed business cards, roll-up banners and other print material for their on-site fundraising promotions. We worked to give Phantasia’s the tools for a strong visual presence at their numerous fundraising events and trade shows.

Phantasia’s goal is to provide the best fundraising products available, at wholesale prices, so groups can make the highest profits for their efforts. Our goal is to make sure they look good doing it.

Visit www.phantasiasjewelry.com

With the holiday season upon us it’s time for lights, food, family, shopping­ (ugh!) and, of course music. The holiday season has its own visual style that is applicable to design projects pretty much once a year.

That recognizable visual style of the season makes these holiday albums a nice change of pace for us. Bighouse collaborated with Rich Mays at Sonare Recordings on these albums. We worked to keep the feeling of the holidays represented in the design as well as incorporating elements unique to the venue of each concert.

“Sounds of the Season” was created for the Savannah Country Day School choruses in Savannah, GA. The design is meant to be imaginative and magical.

Decatur Presbyterian Church, in Decatur, GA, titled their holiday concert “The Marvel of This Night. We wanted to incorporate the beautiful stained glass window adorning the church into the design and then decided to take an abstract approach to the lights of the season for the background art.

Nele Ewaldsen is the pianist for the Lutheran Church of the Ascension in Savannah, GA. She heads the church’s Christmas concert, Jubilation. This project was on a tight deadline. The church window was used for the design — both as it appears and edited digitally and used as the back ground pattern.

St. Philip’s church in Charleston was in need of packaging for Christmas performance, Song’s of the Angels. St. Philip’s has a number of sculpted angels in the church that were perfect for album art. We worked with the client to get the highest quality photos of the church interior for the design and paired them up with a rich, warm red evocative of the season. Pour the eggnog and press play.

Bighouse graphix along with Savannah Tech has won two Gold Awards for its marketing and recruitment efforts in the 23^rd Annual Admissions Advertising Awards, a national competition for college and university marketing professionals. The Hire Education ad series won in the category of Newspaper Advertising; Program Summary brochures won in the Brochure category.

For both projects, Gail Eubanks served as creative director; Steve Mousourakis, owner of bighouse graphix, was the designer. This is the fifth consecutive year the college has earned one or more national marketing awards. A copy of this article can be found here.

Savannah Technical College serves just over 4,000 students each quarter with locations in Savannah, Effingham and Liberty counties.