Project Overview
Potwin Construction was seeking to take their business to the next level. They wanted to be defined by professional looking branding and extend their web presence outside of their Facebook page to reaching new customers.
Potwin Construction
Website for Lincoln, NE based home remodelling company, Potwin Construction. The site features custom built modal and carousel components to feature the company’s work photos. *Project unfortunately cancelled due to Covid-19.
Tech Used
Gatsby
GraphQL
Node.js
Sass
Netlify
Figma
Affinity Designer
Affinity Photo
Source Code
FrontendBuilding a Digital Footprint
Researching the Competition
My first step for the project was to conduct market research of local and national construction companies to see how they portray their services and to identify common branding elements. The goal for Potwin Construction was to make it clear that they provided construction services with just enough defining characteristics to make them stand out from their competition.
Building a Brand
For the brand logo, I knew I wanted to shy away from using house or roofing imagery to help differentiate from competitors. I created several sketch iterations of possible logo shapes before settling on a simple and clean nested hammer design. After selecting the shape, I created several more versions with small adjustments to find the best overall balance.
Looking Closely at Type
When deciding on a font, I like to write out the business name and look at each letter combination to locate any challenges. For Potwin Construction, I knew that I wanted an open "P", and slightly skinnier "O" and "W" shapes to improve balance. I settled on Yantramanav since it fit my goals and had some quirky typographic details like a curly leg on capital R.
Developing the Web Presence
With the branding in place, I next created the landing page for Potwin Construction. I settled on an efficient one page design, since the company was just starting out and didn't have a lot of content to fill a multi-page website. I used a web framework called Gatsby, which has several performance benefits that make it load almost instantly and provides several optimized image features.
Showing Off The Work
To display the companies work photos, I developed several custom components including a lightbox modal and a carousel. I used GraphQL to pull in data during the website's build process and create optimized images that swap out in real time depending on which screen size the website is viewed at.
Wrapping Up
To help tie the project all together, I developed a new set of business cards for the owner to help spread the message for the website. Unfortunately the project was canceled before launch due to Covid-19, but I'm still proud of the work that was created!
