Summit Trading Company
Webpage designs, advertising campaigns, food stall designs etc.
for Summit Trading. LLC, a Japanese food trading company.
Client Brief
Summit Trading Company is a B2B trading company, responsible for the import & export of Japanese food items in the Middle East. Having been established since 1977 they express great heritage and passion for the service. I have been regularly commissioned to help build their brand through designing advertising campaigns, posters for food stalls and most recently to re-design their webpage.
Their projects have been quite interesting as it challenges me to build a design language that is both rooted in Japanese history but at the same time has a sense of modernity and minimalism which are ideas synonymous with the Japan of today.
Process
Research has always begun with a discovery session to understand the clients needs and expectations. After going over a few examples and references I take their remarks, feedback etc back to the drawing board and work on a series of samples to offer. Later I review the samples with the client to see which suits their needs best and work on fine tuning it before its launch.
Often these projects have led me to work in collaboration with printing presses and web developers to make the sure the final results are as envisioned, making changes when necessary but also making sure the design is not compromised. These projects have taught me a lot about how design in the real world works and what we can do to further optimize it.
Advertisement Campaigns
The advertisement campaigns for Summit were an opportunity for me to translate the brand values and identities into posters for various events, most notably for the Gulf Food Exhibitions. These posters were aimed at communicating what Summit is best at doing and what they can offer to a range of clients.
Amongst the work done for their campaigns the most interesting project was designing their delivery truck artwork. This was my first large print project and was a great learning opportunity. The process began with understanding the clients needs & goals with the artwork and later transitioned to sketching & designing multiple options with their points in mind.
Once they had locked the design, it was time to communicate the same concepts to the printing press to get a final result that was as close to the mockups as possible. This was a great opportunity to understand the limitations of a print and design to accommodate them in the future. By the end of the process, the moment when the artwork went up on their trucks was surreal and unforgettable.
Webpage Design
Most recently I was commissioned by Summit to help them re-design their webpage. This was again a golden opportunity to put my skills to the test and use what I have been practicing and learn all along in the real world.
Their current website was quite efficient in terms of communicating a lot about the company in a concise and compressed manner, but somewhere down the line that turned into the issue, where a lot of information was crammed in a small space and confused the visitors on how to navigate through the website. Essentially their website had the right content but needed a sense of hierarchy and re-arrangement.
We followed the regular process of having a discovery session and later jumping into sketching, but this time once I had the sketches in place I used Google Sites to prototype the idea rather than having passive pdf files to communicate the flow of the website. This helped quite a lot in translating the idea to the clients and almost putting them in the shoes of the visitors to their website. Using this we were clearly able to analyze which features of the website worked and which didn't to streamline the website into its final version.
Summit Trading Company
Webpage designs, advertising campaigns, food stall designs etc.
for Summit Trading. LLC, a Japanese food trading company.