Choosing WordPress was easy for a few reasons:

1. Ease of use – the ability to upload a blog whenever you want was great, and with smartphone apps, you can pretty much do it anywhere
2. It’s flexiable to coding, add as many tools as you want to adapt to your business’s growth
3. Customisable –  to your companies branding
4. Interactive – with links to social media to promote images and ideas
5. Updates for browser compatibility - face it technology is growing faster than most of us can keep up, they do it for you.
6. and most of all its free.

With these features it was easy to choose WordPress over other CMS (both free and bought) We kept the portfolio galleries individual, which allows people to find exactly what they were after. Some designers tend to put their portfolios in broad umbrella categories, meaning they will have logo development, stationery design, illustration, and others in one section.  This forces the viewer to search around like a child on Easter morning. Since people are usually time poor, we kept the portfolio easy to move around, but still gave them information if they were interested. *If you are time poor, thank you for reading this. – Management

So have a search around the site. Check out the blog entries. Read the history of the pieces, and leave a comment if you want. As you can see the site is still in progress and we plan to update constantly (thank you google).  Make sure you check out our Facebook page here, and click the “like” button.

Thank you.

Greg Curtis

Owner of Floating Mountain Design

Front cover for nehta style guide

When you need to convey a message in a glance you can not go past icons. These little graphical representations have been with us for 1000s of years from caveman drawings, to religious artefacts to little symbols on our webpages. How many times have you gone to a page to find a phone number to contact them, only to scan you eyes and focus on the little phone icon? Icons just make our life that little bit easier.

I have been designing icons for nehta for awhile now and have designed over  210 plus industry based icons depicting everything from beakers to doctors to x-rays. The client need a way to be able to flip through the icons to find out which one best suited their application. I composed a catalog of icons 22 page (and growing) document which also included the do’s and don’ts of icon usage.  For the front cover  illustration,  I wanted to give the client something to stand out. I composed the icons in a collage and gave it an ornamental background.

When I took on Summit Financial Services as a client they had already had the logo created. The designer who had originally created the artwork had decided to hang up her computer and mouse and call it a day. I then had to go in and update the logo. The font they had originally used was a condensed Swiss type font and just didn’t look the best. I changed the  font and assigned them Pantone colours so from that point onwards we had a baseline to keep all of the colours the same. Their business cards were different from employee to employee and nothing remained consistent. After finalizing the logo, with the selection of the corporate font, then the colours, we went to work on the layout. Since their name was “Summit” we decided to make the business cards vertical to reflect that they were vertical thinking. We gave the backs of the cards the exact same background which listed out their services.

Once the business cards were complete we went to work on the rest of the stationery. The Complimentary Slips were designed to reflect the business cards, but we chose to make them horizontal to keep it traditional. With the letterheads we removed the watermark, by request from the client to keep the main portion of the page clutter free. Now the client has a uniform looking stationery and when we do additional marketing for web, advertisements and so forth, we make sure that it all fits into their corporate branding.

Check out Summit Finanical Services online at: http://www.summitfinancial.com.au

Terrane Engineering Civil Consultants is a Ipswich civil engineering based company. Floating Mountain was asked to create their corporate branding including logo design, business cards, stationery, signage and website.

An initial scoping meeting helped Floating Mountain Design understand the vision and message of the company. Through further consultation the final artwork was approved. As requested, this design presents a strong position of integrity and reliability to the market and translate well in both stationery printed mediums and onsite signage.

Seen something you like? Wanna stay in touch with Floating Mountain Design. When make sure you join our facebook page and keep up to date on all great things happening at Floating Mountain Design.

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My client requested a word template that they could drop in a text box and change the details from time to time. This client had a specific style for their branding which I helped to develop. However for this project they wanted something different to distance themselves from the day to day workings.

The design needed to reflect their healthy social club with a vibrant, energetic poster that was full of life that appealed to their Gen Y staff. Using bold colours and blending the background into the photograph with a series of “light strokes” brushes. The client was very happy with the results. I then added a box that stood out from the background. I then created a Microsoft Word format of the poster and added a text box placed with temporary text.

The design was also modified to create an email footer for all social club email correspondence. In this way both the message and the theme were reinforced.

The Onetest HR Workflow Model is one of my favourite corporate illustrations as it  brings together several design elements to convey an image easily. The client wanted to put together an image that their staff could use in presentations, as well as their marketing material in both print and web. I sat down with the client and they went over the criterial that had to be included and what information was nice to have but not entirely necessary. That is one of the hardest parts of marketing is the culling of information. People often believe that more is good, when sometimes it can backfire and people are just too busy to sit and read pages upon pages on why your company is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The illustration was heavily influenced by the companies branding. All four of their companies colour where used, along with the use of their company font.The corporate illustration can be broken down into 4 stages. The inner circle represents the tagline of the company with the three word: recruit, develop & retain. The next circle radiating outwards with all of the text is the employee life cycle. All of these portions belong to a certain steps of the process. To link these up I brought the corporate colours into this stage. That way you can use the colours to navigate your way around the diagram.

The third stage was the green and red bars that aligned to the second stage. They were there to indicate how much of that step Onetest was able to help you out with. This part was further described in the legend (not shown). The last stage was to describe the methodology that overlaid the existing framework and where each element fell into.

The use of arrows both inward and clockwise brought the viewers eye towards the idea that Onetest was a crucial part of your companies HR solutions. The use of shadows and gradients help give it a level of complexity.

It was used in sales meeting to be place in front of clients as a kind of map. When they would speak about the progress they could say  “Now we are here” It gave the customers a better understanding on how it all fits together. I have received great feedback from the client telling me it really helped their sales staff convey their message.

Sometimes you nail the design the first time, and sometimes you need to work into the weekend.

Ok let me set the scenario. So you just finished the layout of the 4 page brochure. You spent the time to visualise the layout. You set up the grid, you arranged the artwork so the reader can easily navigate the layout and are happy with the design. All is left now is to wait for confirmation from the client to be able to send the artwork to print. Then you get an email at 4:30pm on a Friday.

“We decided to go in a different direction for the inside spread of the brochure. Do you have time to create the illustration for us by Monday morning and resubmit it to us?”

Luckily for me the client decided to pretty much scrap the text and images from the inside two pages, except for the header across the top. After finding out the size limitations of where it had to go I proceed to create a corporate illustration of the Life Cycle of an Employee. The client had provided me with a hand drawn sketch of how the process work and it was up to me to convey it in a easy to understand graphic.  I created the graphic in Adobe Illustrator and using their branding style guide (a reference guide to a companies colour fonts and design elements), I was able to promote their companies presence with visual branding throughout the illustration. This is important to constantly use elements and colours to evolve your brand. How often do you see Powerpoint presentations that staff just grab images off the web? Often you can tell they “lifted” it off a competitors website. One time I saw a presenter use a graphic that had their competitor’s logo on the image, and they were using their selling points to sell their product!

Once the graphic was completed I dropped it into the layout of the brochure and emailed it to the client for approval once more. Other than a few text changes it was approved for printing. The best part of this was that I still managed to have Sunday with the family.

coming soon

coming soon