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The Designer

• The Early Years

• It seemed growing up, I was always more fascinated with advertisements and commercials over the actual content found in magazines and television programs. Which might explain my gravitation towards art, graphic design, and marketing in general. From my beginnings as a graphic designer over 15 years ago, my evolution into the world of web design and web development has been a quick one. Soon, I would realize that there was a need for functional web designs, containing strong brand identity, that were easily transferable to tangible marketing tools.

  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, I spent most of my youth drawing, enjoying the local music scene and watching a lot television (maybe even too much). Drawing was always something I wanted to do for a living, but never understood how it could be applied to a career. While I considered entering college with a major in engineering, I soon learned about the graphic design field. It was almost hard for me to believe that people can make a living by doing something they enjoyed. It was not hard sell.

  While attending the University of New Haven, I joined the campus radio station, WNHU, in parallel with an internship at the top commercial station at the time, WPLR. Little did I know, the skills used in editing audio and creating copy for commercial reads would soon to be an asset for my future working in multimedia design and print collateral. Since I obviously wasn't busy enough, I found time to freelance by creating flyers, business cards, and posters for friends and local businesses.

• The Move West

• Upon earning my BA in graphic design, I immediately left my home of 24 years and moved to California's Bay Area. Soon, I was designing and producing content and graphics for one of the many .com companies that were popping up at that time. As the company grew, I found myself gravitating to the web aspect of design. I took it upon myself to learn HTML, CSS, Flash, ActionScript and JavaScript in order to keep up with the companies needs. In a short period of time, I picked up a teaching position in Fremont, where I taught web design as well as contributed designs for marketing collateral. It was also at this time, I began doing side jobs in web design. This would be my most productive time since I arrived in California.

  Still eager to learn more, I wanted to seriously get back into the online industry in order to understand best practices and standards. I left the teaching gig and picked up a position with Kagi, an online retailer, who offers an outsourced shopping cart for people who wanted to sell online. Starting out as the Web Master, I redesigned Kagi's brand, web site layout, and user interface for the online store.

  As I progressed through the company, I began to understand how to generate effective user experiences and the importance of intuitive design. Soon, I found myself developing front-end and back-end scripts for getting data and rendering dynamic content. Since Kagi is an e-commerce company, we focused on optimizing the shopping cart experience in order to reduce abandonment, increase retention, and speeding up performance. I still consult for Kagi from time to time and it has pushed me to design smarter and to gain even more knowledge with what makes a site successful.

• Starting The Business

• Joe Carrano Designs pretty much started by accident. Before leaving my teaching position, I had a few chance meetings with people in need of promotional web sites. Since I was no longer working for the .com and I was eager to learn more about the internet, I made the decision to officially start my own business. My first client was Mike Swick of UFC fame, who I still do work for to this day. Mike needed an online presence to promote his fights as well as to gain recognition in order to enter the UFC. As more people saw the success of the design for Mike's site, I began gaining more clients purely through word of mouth.

  As time went on, my clients began to have more sophisticated design needs with their web sites. Through the experiences with my peers at Kagi, I was able to parlay the technologies and technics used on a heavily visited website to the design needs of my clients. Soon, I was implementing database driven Flash sites, e-commerce interfaces, RSS feeds and AJAX calls. I also began embracing open source technologies like PHP and heavily using JavaScript Libraries like Prototype.

  Today, my work in web design is more sound then ever and I never lost my love for excellent clean design, whether it be graphical or code based. As technologies come and go, I plan on being there to witness them and even use a few. What I am most eager to see is what I can accomplish next with tools that the future will provide under my belt.

Web Presence

• Jasper Hill Group

  A business consulting group out of San Jose, CA in need of a site to promote blogging. Built upon a Joomla back-end.

• Combat Life

  T-shirt and clothing line targeting fans of athletics, combat sports and military. CSS facelift on previous built site.

• Savage Inc Fightwear

  T-shirt and clothing line targeting fans of combat sports. Dynamic Flash site based on a mySQL database.

• Baron Drexel Law

  Oakland based personal injury lawyer. Website to promote practice and collect leads.

• Die-Tech Tooling

  San Jose based machine and tooling shop specializing in semiconductor manufacturing. Website to promote services and products.

• Dave Camarillo

  Jiu-Jitsu expert and instructor. Site informs future and current students on instruction schedule, communicate news and promote new books and other products.

Brand Identity

• Kagi Online Stores

  Kagi is an e-commerce retailer specializing in providing hosted online shopping carts to software developers. This case study will go through elements created, through my lead, to give Kagi a strong identity.

• Logo Reinvention

• Kagi's identity began with the logo redesign. The original logo was compressed, very stylized and hard to read. We wanted the logo to feel firm in order to have companies feel confident using Kagi. The font was based off a current font style and was stylized in order to be unique. Give more weight to the "K" helped balance the logo as a whole when the red accent was included. See Sample...

• Business Collateral

• We carried over the new logo design to all other collateral used by the business from business cards, print receipts and post cards. Along the way, we came up with a color scheme that we could consistently reuse for all future designs and projects. See Sample...

• Print Marketing and Promotion

• We came up with a marketing promotion for the Macworld Expo in order to promote our brand as well as promoting the software companies using our service. The idea was to have a CD filled with demo software, where users could try and then buy the title through our service. We designed a CD envelope that targeted Mac users, gave exposure to the software developers and the Kagi Brand. See Sample...

• Multimedia Promotion

• Explaining the reason to use Kagi to potential clients was a bit dry and a bit hard to follow when explained purely in text. Not to mention, it was pretty lengthy. In order to connect the dots, a multimedia presentation was implemented on the site in order to better explain how e-commerce works and showing how Kagi can make the process of having an online store easier. See Sample...

• Trade Show Exposure

• With the new branding, collateral, and marketing tools, we were able to tie everything together with our presence at the Macworld Expo. We altered the look and feel of the standard booth by creating a unique curved back and rounded signage, instead of the standard straight edges. The messaging was kept simple in order to convey ideas quickly in a highly trafficked area. Our design continued to the back of the booth in order attract persons out view from the front of the booth. We continued to use our color scheme with the booth and marketing materials. See Sample...

Print Collateral

• Jasper Hill Group

  Business Card Design

• Wellisch & Associates

  Business Card Design

• InnerPimp

  Promo Flyer

• Combat Life

  Promo Flyer

• Hipeq

  Promo Brochure

• Dietech

  Brochure

• Coach Balano

  Poster

• Haphazard Productions

  DVD cover

Graphics & Illustration

• Jasper Hill Group

  Logo Design

• Combat Life

  Logo Design, T-Shirt Art, Web Graphics

• Kagi

  Logo Design, Mascot Illustration, Web Icon Graphics

• Harmack Tool & Die

  Logo Design

• Commercial Art

  Watercolor Art