We’re proud of our finished products. But we’re also proud of many of the designs and concepts we’ve developed through the years that the client ultimately didn’t choose. Thus, for a peek behind the curtain, we have gathered for you here a selection of work that we loved, but the client didn’t love quite as much. Or, as they might delicately put it, they liked it, but they decided to go in a different direction.

Some of this work is from projects we did for clients you can find on this site, while other work is from projects that never got off the ground. We think all of it is pretty fun, even though none of it made the final cut.

Just think of this as the deleted scenes section on a DVD.

Before there was a Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, there was an idea to combine the Washington University schools of art and architecture under one umbrella and create a design center. We were approached to design a temporary site that would provide basic information on the center while it evolved through its early stages.

The Visual Arts and Design Center, as it was called in those initial years, never saw the light of day, and neither did this design, mostly due to the inevitable politics and the complex decision-making process inherent in large institutions. Of course, when a large donor like Sam Fox shows up, the process tends to speed up; in this case, the project went in a different direction as well. Still, we think this design would have been a perfect fit: dynamic, colorful, and accessible, this look included all the ideas in an abstract way, while still honoring the brand guidelines established by the university.

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This design was too out there for Interlochen, an arts academy in Michigan. In their creative brief, they said they wanted something that didn’t look or feel archival. This design certainly accomplished that, but the shapes were too aggressive, the way the images were cut up was too intense, and the patterning, layering, and complexity of the final image were a bit too progressive for them. They wanted different, but this was too much of a departure from where they had been, and the design they settled on was a good compromise between the intense manipulation of the imagery in this design and the more traditional look they had before.

We loved this as an image, but we also knew that it was challenging for this client. But, part of finding the right story is testing out different tacks in the Preview Screening phase, and finding out which approach feels most authentic. In the end, Interlochen chose the best design for their audience and their needs.

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AMG Advanced Metallurgical Group, N.V. was born in 2007 when Safeguard International brought their metals holdings together in a new company, with an eye on an IPO. In the Framing phase, they expressed a desire for a logo that conveyed strength, but with a forward-thinking feel, to reflect their involvement in cutting-edge technologies like solar-grade silicon and ultralight titanium. We developed several logo, branding, and site design options that we thought matched this muscular objective (as well as a few tag lines we were quite fond of, including “Moving metal forward”), but it turns out we were thinking a little more forward than the AMG executives, who preferred a more conservative design.

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Tom O’Brien, a retired math professor from Southern Illinois University, had been making cool little math-driven, brain-twister games that could be played on the Palm Pilot. He approached us because he wanted to take these games into the Flash realm, and make them Shockwave games that could be played on shockwave.com. We designed several interfaces to make the games as visually engaging as they were mentally stimulating, including these two, one in which little Jimmy needed to get home for dinner from his friend’s house at night and one where a 15th Century exploror must find the gold. Alas, while Professor Tom liked the designs, he wasn’t ready to move ahead due to other factors, and the project stalled.

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Jill’s sculpture alternates between two themes: serene and beautiful, and jagged and aggressive. In both cases, her installations are site-specific, and she modifies the existing architecture to create a surreal, disorienting space that’s quite unlike the room that was there before she got her hands on it.

We delivered two versions of her site, one to match each of these themes. This one fit with the jagged and aggressive pieces, and built off of one of those installations—a wall to which Jill had given a five o’clock shadow, with giant-sized rubber stubble. We took a photo of that piece and got aggressive with it ourselves, flipping the image on its side, playing with the negative space, and cutting the image up so that it became something new, while retaining the look and feel of the stubbly wall. Jill loved both versions, but felt this one was a bit too radical for her.

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Meredith’s photography focuses on gorgeous landscapes from all over the world. We thought her iceberg photos would serve as a striking starting point for her home page. This design was meant to be a dynamic interface, with a navigation bar that wasn’t locked down to one spot on the page, but rather adjusted to the center point of the featured photograph, regardless of the image’s size or orientation.

Meredith really liked the look, and thought the movement and the “floating” effect were very cool, but in the Preview Screening, people were a bit overwhelmed by the interface. Several commented that all the options were just too much, and that they couldn’t really focus on the photography. Ultimately, Meredith went with the typography, color palette and general feel of this design, but decided this interface was a little too technologically advanced for her audience, so we scaled it back to something simpler. The design she chose is still very cool, but not nearly as surreal.

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