Christopher Marques

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Graphics by Color Group

As this agile company continued to adapt with the times, so did their web presence. Our approach aimed to reflect the contemporary ethos of Color Group, providing a forward-thinking online platform that resonates with their diverse clientele and showcases their innovative services. A fresh look for an evolving business.

Overview

Established in 1946 as a small photographic color print house, Color Group, has evolved into 'Graphics by Color Group,' a comprehensive service provider, described as a 'Custom Design Shop,' with website design playing a pivotal role in showcasing their diverse and expansive capabilities.

Client

Graphics by Color Group

Role

Web Developer/Designer, Graphic Designer

Services provided

Web Design, Branding, Graphic Design

Year Completed

2020

Platform

WordPress

Visit Site

Challenge

Articulating Color Group's unique services proves challenging, impacting the design process by necessitating a careful balance between clarity and inclusivity on the website.

Objectives

Our primary objective was to showcase the extensive range of Color Group's services through web design, ensuring a comprehensive representation that goes beyond traditional labels.

Research

Color Group is a long-standing print shop in Westchester, New York. Established in 1946 as ‘Color Group Imaging & Graphics,’ a small photographic color print house. As the business passed from father to son, the next generation introduced its solutions to the challenges of the new era. With time came a new name, ‘Graphics by Color Group,’ and a rebranding as ‘A Full Service Digital, Graphics, Display, Photographic, Prepress, and Visual Resource.’ ‘Color Group,’ is how employees refer to their work and how locals identify the building where the company resides.

Color Group now boasts 14 categories of services, including Building Signage, Murals, Lobby and Tradeshow Displays, Cad Designs, and Wayfinding. This list is just a summary of their capabilities. During my freelancing with them, I’ve seen clients bring ideas and dreams that Color Group turns into reality. Whatever visual or display needs a company might have, they find a way to deliver.

Describing Color Group is a challenge. The closest characterization I could muster is that it’s a ‘Custom Design Shop.’ Even that phrase seems nebulous. Conveying the expansive and distinctive nature of their services remains a linguistic puzzle. That’s why the website design was so crucial. The project began by me sketching up some wireframes of what I envisioned the site to look like, based on how their old site functioned and the services they offered. 

Design System

Color Group was looking for a site that felt more modern, and was easier for clients to navigate and view their work. With a wide range of services, we opted for a neutral color palette, so as not to clash with their imagery.

aa

Acier

Heading

size 60/50/35

Aa

Futura

Body

size 35/28/18/17/14/12

#0E0D0D

#111111

#888888

#EEEEEE

#00000000

Challenges:

  • Many of the links on the site no longer worked.
  • Customers couldn’t see examples since site was broken. 
  • Wasn’t organized based on their current offerings. 

Goals:

  • Show extensive portfolio
    • Over 75 years of work/experience 
  • Make use of short documentary that was made about company
    • i.e. the demo reel at the top of homepage

Before

After

Beat Vortex

Previous
Next

Beat Vortex is the working title for a rhythm game I began working on in 2018. 
I picked back up work on the project during 2020 to see how much further along I could get. 

After extensive research, I was able to implement multithreading for the song loading and analysis.  
This took load times on mobile from 7-12 minutes depending on the song to 50-90 secs. 

I later use a similar technique to improve the terrain generation, which yielded similar results. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello. 

Honor Lore and art

During the pandemic, I took the opportunity to freelance and work from home as a way for me to focus on finishing up one of my passion projects.  

One of the first steps along this journey was to develop more of the lore and background of the world. 

Honor Rulebook

As progress on the game began to pick up steam, I shifted focus over to refining the rulebook I had previously thrown together during the original development. 

As part of the process, visual and grammatical improvements were made to improve the flow and clarity of the rules. 

After completing the revisions of the rulebook, the project moved forward into play tests and further refinement. 

Journal App

This past year I started working on developing a productivity app. I felt that the to-do list’s or habit trackers I had tried were very narrowly focused on doing one thing well. This often left users needing multiple apps to handle simple planning and task management for their day to day. This creates a lot of opportunities for confusion,  wasted time, and more pain points than their software solves. 

The goal of the Journal App is to give every day users the same depth and control over planning of their schedules as we have for corporations with software like Jira, Trello, Monday, or Asana. 

This project has been a great test of my UI design and implementation. It has also given me a chance to further improve my workflow for loading/storing user data. 

Tools used:  Photoshop, Trello, Unity, Visual Studio. 

Tulipanov Virtual Gallery

For this project, I was asked by the painter, Igor Tulipanov, to create a virtual gallery space where he could host private exhibitions of his art. 

I used a concept image he gave me to model the exterior off of. I then designed an interior that worked well for that space and fit his unique art style. 

The final goal for the project is to be able to embed the gallery on the homepage of their site. This proved to be the main challenge of this project was setting up the ‘multiplayer’ aspect, due to it being webgl. 

 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Photon 

Pip42 - 1 : Building design

PIP42 – 1 gives players the ability to place down structures and create bases on a foreign planet. To do this required a modular building. 

I started off by building a mood board of space structures that I felt fit the aesthetic I was looking for. 
Since the game is top down, I need to design with the ability for the  roof of all the models to be removable. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya. PureRef. 

Honor Stats Rebalancing

After the first few play tests, we found the stats for Honor needed to be rebalanced. 
Using google sheets allowed me to visualize the distributions of stats for classes, weapons, and armor. 
I was able to do this using conditional formatting, which I set to shade cell based on their value. 

The original stat calculations took a considerable amount of time to work out. 
Developing a new system cut down the time substantially. 

Tools used: Google Sheets

Honor Card Design

Over a few months, I worked to refine the card designs for my tabletop card game. Here are some iterations of the early stages. 

After not seeing much progress towards a suitable design, I decided to create a mood board to help define what I wanted to create. 

I’ve settled on a simplified look with minimal framing, allowing more room to let the art shine. 

After settling on the new design, I began implementing those concepts across the rest of the card types from the game.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Pureref

Graphics by Color Group

Before
After

This was a project for a local business. They wanted their site updated to something that was more modern and fresh than their old site. 
I designed and built out the new site remotely, then swapped the site out over night to prevent downtime and users seeing a broken site. 

www.ColorGroup.com

Museum of Bops

Previous
Next

Museum of Bops was a freelance animation project for the painter Igor Tulipanov.  

Igor wished to see the characters from his paintings come to life. 

I modeled the character, built out a museum and animated all the characters.

The video is the intro of the project where the characters enter the museum before climbing into the paintings to interact with their fellow bops

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello.