This print campaign for Georgia’s second largest convention center, the Georgia International Convention Center (GICC), places the facility’s acronym front and center. Each ad catches the reader’s attention with bright colors and a fun play on words—plus the occasional earworm.
Although Member One Federal Credit Union has grown to a healthy size, it is still first and foremost a part of its Virginia community. To help keep video messaging centered on this truth, Ethic has developed the Member One community, an animated town where everyday neighbors’ lives are improved by cooperation with one another—and by the products and services offered by Member One.
The community, which today includes high, medium and low density housing, a school, a park, a hospital, a few shops and a Member One retail location, has evolved over time as all communities do.
Its characters live, work and play against this backdrop: an ice cream man rolls down the street with his dog, young professionals plug away at their phones and laptops on park benches and scooters, friends pause during a jog to enjoy street magic or grab a bite at the corner sidewalk cafe. Kids hop on and off of school buses and gather in treehouses. Families buy homes, homeowners renovate, and neighborhood groups practice yoga in the park. Member One is part of it all, sometimes literally (guess what mobile app those young professionals are using!) or simply as a reminder that Member One is not only staffed by local community members, but owned by its members as well.
Our early community TV spots kept the camera at a distance, as in the community’s debut, below. Over time, we’ve pushed closer to the lives of our characters, making them more expressive and allowing them to bring the community itself to life as it continues to provide the thread that connects them.
Here, we’ve reimagined our first home buyers from a new perspective, illustrating how they might look in today’s updated community aesthetic.
Member One itself is often seen in the Member One community, of course. That sleek modern architecture is a great background for many scenes, like this Checking ad.
The consistent use of the flat animation style and the neighborhood itself have contributed to increased brand recognition within the credit union’s local market. This also provides a convenient animation framework that allows us to create explainers and other videos in short order as needed.
When BCD Travel needed a new website for their TripSource brand, they turned to us to build it. The site is a complete top-to-bottom redesign from their previous look, with scroll-activated animations to help explain key features of the TripSource platform. The site was a complex development undertaking but we were up to the task and delivered it on a tight schedule to be showcased at an upcoming conference.
Just next door to our friends at Healthy Habits bike shop is Crawford Brew Works. We like to think of beer as good carbs, so we’re all about helping out breweries when we get the chance. If it’s bike-related, that’s a bonus. Here are a few of the cycling jerseys we’ve designed for the cool kids at Crawford over the years—including some collabs with Healthy Habits.
A mascot or illustrated spokesperson can be an effective way to help your audience build connections with your brand, both visually and emotionally. In the case of Ascentra Credit Union, this approach also allows us to bring brand unity to the client’s especially wide variety of offers and benefits. Creatively, these characters are also a lot of fun to work with, because they give us a base with which to illustrate all kinds of situations. Here’s how Ethic has taken Ascentra’s mascot game to the next level.
While the old website had once been adequate for a young organization, by 2020, it begged for an overhaul. The look hadn’t kept up as the District’s tone became more modern and offbeat, and the evolving sitemap had gone from slightly overgrown to badly rootbound over the years. Ethic saw an opportunity to give the client more than an aesthetic update. We took a stern look at the site’s many distinct responsibilities and complex content collections, devising an experience that feels breezy to the user while expertly guiding them toward featured information specific to their role and needs.
Having worked with several Convention & Visitors Bureaus through the years, Ethic knows there’s nothing more important than photography. From highlighting a city’s assets to creating killer advertising, Ethic is on the scene, snapping the shots we need to bring a community to life. If we can’t shoot it ourselves, we work with fantastic partners to ensure we get what we need every time. Here are few of our favorite Lifestyle Shots.
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Sollos is Halco Lighting Technology’s entry into the competitive world of landscape lighting. Building on their expertise as a bulb manufacturer, they designed and engineered this elegant, versatile new line of fixtures
to bring together form, function, and efficiency. Every Sollos fixture works interchangeably with an assortment of Halco lamp technologies, including energy-efficient LED and halogen-xenon bulbs.
Halco engaged Ethic early in the development of this product line to create both the name and brand identity. To separate Sollos from the competition, we introduced an aspirational aesthetic focused on high design, quality, and superior technology. The resulting graphics define Sollos as both stylish and smart – a fresh approach backed by a trusted name in the industry.
The ATL Airport District is a single destination marketing organization. Although the District is technically a handful of cities surrounding the ATL airport, we typically market them as a unified bloc. The line between College Park and Hapeville (for instance) scarcely impacts the casual visitor.
However, there are instances in which it’s appropriate for the cities to tout their individual identities, so we created brochures that each could use to promote their particular city—while still co-branding all four with a similar aesthetic to reinforce the unity of the District. Each brochure outlines the unique strengths of that city while showing off its most beautiful imagery.
After rebranding the ATL Airport Chamber, Ethic took a look at its out-of-date website. It hadn’t been designed with regular updates in mind, and it was handcuffed to a proprietary hosting platform that made edits difficult, so team members didn’t feel they had reasonable control over the content. The look was outdated as well, and the site wasn’t configured to be viewed on mobile devices or smaller screens.
Long story short, it had to go.
Ethic migrated the Chamber to new hosting and redesigned the site from the ground up to be visually appealing, fully responsive, user-friendly and easy to navigate without getting lost. We built it on the Wordpress platform, making it a cinch for team members to update with minimal training and zeroprior experience—whether they’re editing existing pages or adding media of any type (photo galleries, videos, stories, etc.). Stale, difficult-to-update content is a distant memory now that the team canmake changes with a few intuitive clicks.
Launch Site
The Chamber team had also been unhappy with the features and usability of their membershipmanagement software (Wild Apricot), so we migrated them to a customized version of MembershipWorks and fully integrated it withtheir new WordPress site for a seamless backend experience. This allowed us to add a Chamber member directory to the site andgive users the ability to create event listings, which are monitored and approved by the site administrator. Posted events, which can be free or require membership registration (with the ability to pay directly on the site), are then displayed publicly in a list or calendar view. All membership billing and automated subscriptions were configured and built into the system, including Quickbooks integration.
We also made it possible for team members to easily include banner ads across the website, and to collect email addresses and distribute newsletters directly from the WordPress admin panel, which helps them stay connected to members.
As part of the redesign, we performed a search engine optimization (SEO) audit of all content and updated all metadata to improve search engine rankings. Analytics tracking was also integrated into the site to monitor SEO performance.
After the site was launched, we created a user guide to help team members learn and use the new website. We also had several in-person training meetings to ensure everyone knew how to use the system and had the opportunity to ask questions. Now, years later, our relationship with the ATL Airport Chamber continues to thrive; the team does a wonderful job operating the site without our help, and when needed, we assist with functionality updates and additions to help the Chamber team keep things humming.
Before its site redesign, we worked with The Chamber team on their branded identity. After completing a competitive analysis for the Airport Area Chamber of Commerce, it was quickly decided they needed a full rebrand. So, Ethic started with a new name;the ATL Airport Chamber was born.
This little social media campaign was targeted at would-be spectators for our bike race events. For all the spinquisitive minds out there, these seamless two-image Instagram galleries first defined an interesting cycling term in earnest that spectators might like to know. Then, after a quick read and a quick swipe, we revealed how we might redefine the same term to fit the spectator lifestyle. Comedy!
Anyone who’s stopped in a visitor’s center and picked up a bland, info-packed brochure has probably shared the disappointing experience of painstakingly selecting a restaurant from an exhaustive list, figuring out the map, and making their way across town—only to find that their destination has shut down or moved or is no longer serving lunch on Sundays. This is an unfortunate pitfall of traditional destination marketing: the hotels and businesses in any given area typically experience changes far more frequently than brochures can realistically be revised, reprinted and replaced.
Ethic decided that the ATL Airport District would not fall victim to that issue in the digital age. Instead, we put together a heavily branded gatefold brochure that hits the area’s highlights: great hotels, outdoor activities, dining, and proximity to downtown and all of Metro Atlanta. Each is accompanied by bold, beautiful imagery, a short, sweet intro paragraph, and a URL where visitors can find up-to-date business and venue listings. No ghost listings here!
When the brochure is fully opened, its centerfold poster’s display-worthy illustration doubles as a handy-dandy references to Metro Atlanta’s nearest neighborhoods, listing some of their key attractions as well as travel times from the District by highway and transit. This gives the casual visitor an at-a-glance reminder of where they are in relation to everything they might like to do during their stay—and a reminder that the particulars are at their fingertips when they visit the website.
