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.
ATL Airport District Website Design
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.
Lifestyle Photography
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 Branding
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.
ATL Airport District city brochures
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.
AirportChamber.com
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.
The New Site: Beautiful and Usable
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
Backend and Integrations
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.
SEO and Training
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.
#Spincyclopedia Social Media Campaign
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!
ATL Airport District Brochure
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.
ALT Airport District Billboards
Our digital and billboard campaign for the ATL Airport District gave a cohesive voice and aesthetic to the District as a whole—while also spotlighting what’s unique about each of its component cities.
ATL Airport District Tourism Advertising
How do you market a tourism destination that actually contains a bunch of different cities? It’s a delicate process, but the key, as usual, is balance. The first objective is to present it as a single cohesively-branded destination, so as to simplify the concept for out-of-towners who aren’t familiar with the area. But the more you streamline the area’s image, the greater the danger of losing the quirky small-town flavor of each city, which is what really makes it shine.
To create ample opportunity for creative messaging, we designed this campaign for the ATL Airport District with a foundation of loud, cheeky headlines—often including transportation-based puns as a nod to the area’s unique accessibility—set in classic type with vintage overtones. Each headline is paired with dynamic imagery in a daring duotone treatment, while clean lines and minimal layout pull the look squarely into the 21st century. The result is a scannable and recognizable District aesthetic with an irreverent attitude that tells travelers that they’re not in Corporate Downtown anymore.
Open wide and chow down! It’s a breeze when you book your stay in the ATL Airport District. Spend your days exploring all that nearby Atlanta has to offer, and take your pick of hundreds of great District restaurant options when you’re ready to wind down. No parking mysteries. No mile-long wait lists. No surprises. Just good food, and the opportunity to chill out and enjoy it.
Georgia Eats Advertising Copy
LET A LOCAL BE YOUR GUIDE
atldistrict.com/restaurants
Halco Product Catalogs
There’s not a huge demand for product catalogs these days, but during the late-era print heyday of the aughts, Ethic had our hands deep in ’em. No matter the product—radar, clothing, bedding, lightbulbs—we did it all, art directing, designing, copywriting, and even shooting much of it ourselves. Here are a couple of catalogs we completed with our Halco partners, including custom abstract photography shot by Ethic. There is still a need for catalog design, and we love creating them for print and web.
Spin All Day Lager
In 2022, Ethic partnered with Arches Brewing and the ATL Airport District to name, design, and develop a tasty brew for Spin the District, a local cycling event that Ethic has a large hand in. The design incorporates Spin’s brand aesthetic in exuberant color blocks, anchored by the organic touch of a hand-sketched bicycle diagram.
The beer was first debuted and sold at the 2022 Spin the District kickoff. It was available throughout both spring events, the Hapeville Crit and the College Park Crit, to with resounding success amongst attendees.
Born right here in the District, this easy-drinking American Amber Lager helps keep our wheels true and our spokes a-turnin’ with its malty foundation, bitter noble hops, and a hint of caramel.
Ethic’s tasting notes