Client study - Lysis Financial

Lysis are a London-based company dealing with IT systems and business and programme management for the financial industry.

I was initially approached to take over the management of the company's website. Later some print design work was needed too.

Website
The website already existed in its current design, although with considerably less pages, when I was asked to take over the running of it. Inheriting a site like this can cause some problems; initially, the main issue can be working out how the original designer did things. Scripts can be in place on the server which dictate the way some things operate.
I made some minor changes early on. There were no visual changes but they streamlined the site a little making the pages load quicker and made things a little simpler for me when it came to site updates.
Early on I gave Lysis the option for a site redesign. There would be an initial outlay but the theory was that restarting from scratch would make future updates faster and easier saving money over the long term. As a site expends it can be quite difficult adding new menus and pages into a site that was not designed for it.
Lysis declined the redesign although since then it has been penciled in for a future date.

The Lysis site is an example of creatopia's site management skills. It is regularly updated

Promotional material
Sometimes creatopia need to design something which is away from the normal print or web documents.
Lysis wanted to create a mousemat as a give-away for clients to promote a new service.
Two issues needed to be taken into consideration: Firstly the product itself was illustrated by a fairly uninteresting diagram which needed to be made more exciting and, secondly, most computer mice these days do not utilise a ball for movement. There are certain technical considerations to be taken into account with these mice. They work by scanning a small area below the light and then comparing it with the previous scan. If the surface has large, plain areas the mouse has difficulty knowing whether it has moved.
So the diagram was given some perspective to create the illusion of dynamic movement and a multilayered background was added to both add to the general aesthetic and facilitate a decent response from the mouse.

Christmas card
The annual sending of corporate Christmas cards is in decline these days.
Lysis wanted to create a card to send to favoured clients thanking them for their custom. It needed to be corporate, mature and elegant. Several designs were created for Lysis to choose and their favourite. Their choice was for the image on the right, a lone gift on a clean, white background.
The image was bought from stock photography and edited in Photoshop to change the colour of the paper and ribbon to match the clients corporate colours. Photoshop was also use to create the and add label.