This is the principal webpage for our client Marmuse. They are a “referral marketing” company that is targeting the healthcare professional. Essentially, they help these “last mile” professions optimize their referrals. Almost all Dentists, Doctors and other small healthcare related businesses rely on referrals from their clients and other professionals. Marmuse helps these companies by implementing industry best practices to refine their referral success.

This was a quick and dirty project with no budget and no time (what else is new). The page leverages the YAML templates used to build the pilot project site borovayorthondics.com for Marmuse. The creative brief here was pretty simple; Marmuse targets healthcare related businesses and the target market should be able to identify themselves in the visual design. The color palette and the visual imagery are vague enough to imply some generic “health care” service without being too specific. Probably more interesting to the nerds is that this site ( and all the client pilot sites) will be moving to the Google Apps. engine. The traditional LAMP hosting is proving to be too restrictive and kludgy for the anticipated interactive feature sets that will be incorporated into the project sites. I’ll keep you posted on the interesting results as they go live.

More from the literal vault. This sketch is obviously for a fire escape. I would date it as something from the late 90′s.
The building is the Victoria Woolen Mill in Almonte. I had worked on this building for better than a year while I was an intern. The building has a prominent position on the main street and by the river in this town. The building came into the hands of a couple of local developers, one of whom was Stephen Brathwaite. Stephen is an artist of some repute and proved to be a very fun and thoughtful client.

The firm I was interning with was Julian Smith & Associates, a nationally renown heritage conservation architect. As you may expect, the clientele for a heritage focused firm could be classified as conservative. Working on the Mill, with a progressive and free spirit client like Stephen was both liberating and challenging. At some point, my normally reserved sketches were not resonating with him. I took this as an opportunity to really let loose and design in a more modern manner. At first I didn’t share my sketchbook with him, choosing to try and translate the ideas into more conventional plan/section/elevation. But I was soon turning to the book to try and salvage the design meeting. It was both cathartic and transformational. I soon realized why I was working in this field and made an immediate resolution to pursue a more progressive and forward looking agenda.

The client received these sketches with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t allow for most of the ideas, but I have since noticed that the client has used some of the ideas as time and money allowed.

We flipped the switch on a new website project a week ago.

This is one of the first of several pilot projects for our client Marmuse. They are a “referral marketing” company that is targeting the healthcare professional. Essentially, they help these “last mile” professions optimize their referrals. Almost all Dentists, Doctors and other small healthcare related businesses rely on referrals from their clients and other professionals. Marmuse helps these companies by implementing industry best practices to refine their referral success.

This first pilot client is a local orthodontist. In this case, Marmuse was starting with a clean slate. Like many mature businesses, Borovay Orthodontics lacked any real web presence, branding or even a declared business strategy. Much of the ground work has been completed and they are now starting to implement the various tools and metrics that will hopefully improve the company’s business.