Edwards Manufacturing
I've worked on a wide variety of projects at Edwards: designing a new website, printing promotional material, shooting product photography, filming promotional video, and designing magazine ads. Each project has presented new challenges and opportunities to grow as a designer.
Website Redesign
When I started at Edwards Manufacturing, I saw considerable opportunities to improve their outdated website and product photography. My first website updates improved navigation by removing irrelevant category pages and updated the site's theme from a pixelated metal texture to a white page with a minimal header and footer. Since the website redesign and photography happened at the same time, I was able to experiment with JavaScript that would load 8 views of the ironworker and spin the machine around with a mouseover. This experiment was a huge success and is now on every machine Edwards sells.
The next website update was an entirely new eCommerce Website with BrillianceWeb. This new website has its own shopping cart so people can purchase directly on our site and also has integration with our ERP so orders from the website go right into our system. My role during this was to oversee that our data was moving correctly from our old site onto the new one, communicating the changes we wanted to see to BrillianceWeb and monitoring that this new website has the same look and feel of our previous website.
The home page changed dramatically with each update. In the first update I changed the large photo of our machine lineup at the top of the page into an image slider, showing four different images including the machine lineup. In the second update we decided that a simple homepage was what we wanted. We removed the long paragraphs, kept the image slider and added five buttons below the slider to direct people to different places on our site.
Each update also improved usability on mobile. My first update kept everything on screen through some width scaling html code but was a long way from perfect. Our second update was built from the ground up with mobile in mind.
Product Photography
There were considerable improvements needed with Edwards old product photography: most looked cut out of a photo, some were too dark to see details, and others had fake shadows photoshopped underneath them. Once I got hands-on with the machines that Edwards manufactures, it was also clear that many of the photos were out of date. I looked to standardize all of Edwards photography with consistent colors and consistent angles. The improvements are visible on their own.
Edwards tooling also needed considerable improvements. They were all done from different angles and when you line them all up it's not quite clear what you're looking at because the saturation and colors have been altered in an attempt to focus your eye on the tooling. I made adjustments to white out anything unimportant and clearly show what was being described.
Product Catalog
Before I started working at Edwards, they sent me a product catalog in the mail, and what I saw told me that they needed a graphic designer. The metal texture on the cover was pixelated, the photography was all over the place, and the type was inconsistent. My version fixes those issues, which additionally adds new products and pages to the catalog.
On these pages you can see the 20 Ton Shop Press and the 40 Ton Shop Press. All of the photography has been updated to the latest models. If you turn your attention to the old 20 Ton Shop Press' hydraulic hose, you'll notice that something is not right. That's because the cord was photoshopped in. If you look across the page you'll see where it came from.
This spread will show you the new tooling photography that I shot for Edwards compared directly to the previous version. I shot consistent angles so that each piece of tooling shares the same perspective, making it very clear what is changing from picture to picture.
Video
I made several different kinds of videos at Edwards: Interviews, time-lapses, product video, instructional videos and compilations. They're all just one click away; I encourage you to take a look!
This video is displayed at trade shows to catch the attention of people walking by the booth and to quickly show what Edwards equipment can do for a machine shop.
This video was created to promote a new machine. I have to be honest, most of the credit for this video belongs to Gil, the hand model in this video. Gil made all of the awesome tooling in the video, and I simply hit record.
Edwards sent me to a trade show in Vegas where one of our partners built a mini monster truck with our equipment. I interviewed Allen Pezo and created this video.