Zac Halbert Design

Ubokia

zac — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:33:30 +0000

Rather than spending countless hours shopping for a handyman to build a fence or that elusive but perfect vintage motorcycle, Ubokia.com allows you to post what you want and let the sellers respond to your want. It has completely turned the traditional buying process on its head for finding used and hard to find objects. Furthermore, sellers have the opportunity to shop around for the most qualified buyers. I have the opportunity to be part of a stellar team, here. My responsibilities are to take enormous amounts of information and a complicated user experience process, and turn it into an easy to use, coherent web application. Because Ubokia is heavily data-driven, the biggest challenge was to avoid clutter by using a bare minimum of design elements to communicate expected behavior.

Web Design Services

zac — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 20:55:02 +0000

I believe that a good website must fulfill two main criteria: it must work for the user, and it must be beautiful. When designing your website’s function and organization, our goal is to approach everything from the experience of the user. This means that it must be organized in a “common-sense” manner that holds up during user testing, and is visually pleasing in a way that cultivates the proper brand message.

I build beautiful websites with an efficiency of purpose. While I am the sole owner of Zac Halbert Design, I work with other experts in the field on an as-needed basis so you have access to all the expertise without having to pay the costly overhead of permanent employees that larger design shops incur. Even if you are completely new to the web, I use a transparent design process and patiently walk you through everything you need to know. Because my first and best method of marketing is word-of-mouth, I focus only on building what you need so you can confidently recommend me to colleagues and professional contacts.

Free Quote

I offer all new and prospective clients a free, 30 minute consultation. During this time, our goals will be to…

Determine your specific functional needs — I will ask several questions about how you would like your website or application to function, and how that relates to your target market (or ideal user).
Get a feel for your design preferences, if any — In order to sell your business or idea well, I will design in a way that resonates both with your target market, and you, the business owner (because you have the best understanding of your brand’s message).

From the raw material gathered during this meeting, I will craft an actionable, clearly scheduled plan for building your website, along with the budget requirements for such a project.

Eager to get started? Send me a message with your contact information and a brief description of your project and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Print & Logo Design

I also offer a full range of print and logo design services, including business cards, brochures, signage, and sales collateral.

The Technical Details

For those of you with more advanced technical skills, here is my toolkit.

Custom-coded, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS using current best practices.
JavaScript and JQuery for dynamic web effects.
PHP and MySQL for database-driven or content-heavy websites.
For complex CMS-driven websites, I use WordPress with custom-built themes.
For simpler CMS-driven websites, I use CushyCMS.
Flash and Actionscript for presentation-level motion graphics.
Processing (the language) and Adobe Illustrator for data visualization.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 for, basically, everything else.

Swap Co-op

zac — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 04:00:39 +0000

Swap Co-op is an ingenious idea that helps people find the stuff they need from people in their existing social networks. It automates trading, borrowing, lending, and even selling. Now you can share the cost and maintenance of a lawn mower with a few of your neighbors, or set up a carpool to get your kids to school, or even swap houses with a distant acquaintance for a mutual vacation. Anything that can be swapped, is swapped on swapco-op.net.

Foliotwist

zac — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 03:00:53 +0000

I co-founded Foliotwist in 2009 with Dan Duhrkoop (owner of Empty Easel). Since then, we have helped over 250 artists make a living with their art. We provide both an easy-to-use portfolio website and a year of personalized coaching to help artists take advantage of all the web has to offer.

Poly-Flex

zac — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 02:00:09 +0000

I was tasked with creating a simple, “green” website design to help advertise Poly-Flex’s new green alternative to plastic wrapping film. The intent was to create a design that felt very modern, so to avoid the cliches of web 2.0, we settled on a retro-modern feel.

Akoma Village

zac — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:00:56 +0000

Akoma Village was started by Harrison and Cara Tei as a way of providing aid to the under served in Ghana. Harrison is a native Ghanese and a master of traditional drum and dance. Through traveling shows and volunteer trips, the Teis are are attempting to help make a better life for Ghanese villagers. I created this website and logo pro bono, though Harrison was kind enough to offer me some traditional African drum lessons (I decided not to quit my day job just yet).

Parklane

zac — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:00:25 +0000

Parklane is an old Boise, Idaho management company that rents out many apartments centered mostly in Boise’s historic downtown. They even rent the famous haunted hotel, the Idanha. The task with this website was to update their look and make it easy to advertise new apartments and rent specials. We went with warm, inviting colors to capture the sense of home and hearth, though we used younger typography to appeal to downtown apartment dwellers.

GearGrab

zac — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:00:41 +0000

GearGrab began as an answer to Shelly Henderson’s frustration of always needing to buy new sports equipment for her kids. Each year, they grew out of perfectly good equipment, rendering it useless. GearGrab is the answer to this dilemma: users can buy, sell, and trade their used sports equipment.

Crossroads

zac — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:00:48 +0000

Crossroads Community Church needed both a new look, and a way to deliver weekly sermons online to listeners all over the globe. I crafted a design that was not only clean, but captured the more contemporary spirit of the church. This site was especially challenging because it required a series of blogs and newsfeeds for several different departments, though it needed to be based on the existing WordPress structure. What resulted was an extremely customized, but fully scalable WordPress installation with no core hacks.

Bound

zac — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:00:40 +0000

My task with this project was to illustrate and lay out this article for the school paper. The illustration was done with ink and prismacolor markers on illustration board, using my own hands as models (a complicated, probably ridiculous-looking process).