Creative Touch Design: About Us: News




	Our range of expertise means we handle a variety of projects at any given time. Some of our more recent endeavors are profiled below.

	CTD makes it personal with Visa’s hospitality marketing application. BankBlackwell taps CTD to create its online identity and banking site interface Visa Best Practices Center upgrades with CTD CTD in alliance with StealThunder to deliver brand strategy and messaging capabilities to clients CTD redesigns Palo Alto Unified School District site Visa Developers' Conference features CTD speakers Pro-bono: Bob Mullen Memorial Golf Tournament site helps raise funds for the American Cancer Society Visa International makes CTD a Preferred Supplier



	CTD makes it personal with Visa’s hospitality marketing application. CTD has completed a major upgrade of the Visa USA Partnership Marketing Calendar. The limited-access web application is used to promote and manage world-class hospitality opportunities for Visa Members and prospects from Disney, the Olympics, and NASCAR, among others. Working with a programming partner, CTD extended the functionality of the existing system to include personalized end user access and inventory tracking. The new site lets account executives check the status of hospitality requests and view their complete history of approved and denied requests including event information and invitees. Program administrators are able to track inventory quantities and costs and produce detailed reporting on distribution, guests, and program investment. The upgraded site will be supported—and further enhanced—via an annual maintenance contract.



	BankBlackwell taps CTD to create its online identity and banking site interface With the goal of leveraging the predisposition of affluent African Americans for online financial services, and the efficiency of the Internet as a delivery and affinity marketing channel, BankBlackwell, Teknowledge, and CTD set off to create the nations’s first African-American direct community bank. At the beginning of a young business’s life, there is no track record or experience-base to help a potential customer make value judgments. Online banking newcomer BankBlackwell had identified its target audience – young, affluent, community-minded African-Americans – but needed an identity that would maximize its credibility and its message. CTD isolated two critical factors for BankBlackwell’s success. The first was the visual representation of its message, followed by the physical experience of the site. To put a face to BankBlackwell, CTD used images and colors to emphasize warmth, activity, and community. BankBlackwell’s secondary focus on banking for faith-based organizations, with services like auto-tithing, allowed CTD to build on visual concepts tied to long-standing religious heritage and tradition. The visual identity of BankBlackwell needed to merge with and support the user’s interactive experience on the marketing site as well as within the banking application itself. CTD created the marketing site’s minimalist navigation and supported it with open spaces and clear, concise marketing messages. The result was a site that conveyed respect for the user’s time through simple navigation and highly readable content.



	Visa Best Practices Center upgrades with CTD Visa’s Best Practices Center had a laundry list of needs and a limited upgrade budget. CTD worked with Visa to create a statement of work that covered the most important tasks, but the extensive programming budget meant that very little was available for user experience development. Meanwhile, Visa had identified user interaction as a significant concern for the existing application. When it comes to user experience, CTD believes a small, well thought out something is better than nothing. So, although the project’s budget constraints prohibited any formal user research and testing, CTD was able to leverage site traffic data and feedback from the project owners and subject matter experts to explore better approaches to content organization. This input led to a content presentation method suitable to a larger, more diverse user audience. For complete project details, read the portfolio description for the Visa Best Practices Center.



	CTD in alliance with StealThunder to deliver brand strategy and messaging capabilities to clients Creative Touch Design has strengthened its alliance with StealThunder to deliver brand strategy and marketing message solutions to CTD's clients. Based in Silicon Valley, StealThunder is a highly experienced team of brand advisors that has helped companies like Google, Yahoo!, Logitech, Serena Software, and many others solve branding challenges and develop messages and tools to build their businesses more effectively. The partnership enables CTD to expertly address a range of client needs that are increasingly central to its assignments. The relationship has grown over the past two years, producing successful collaborative programs for three of the firm’s key clients.



	CTD redesigns Palo Alto Unified School District site The Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), one of the premier districts in the United States, has partnered with Creative Touch Design in the redesign of its online presence. The final site is the culmination of 15 months of effort by CTD and representatives from every group in the District. "The project was a collaboration from day one," said Marie Scigliano, Director of IT and Educational Technology. "Their team was adept at listening to us and communicating back meaningful ideas and goals on which the group could agree. As the project progressed, we found their example of teamwork to be contagious." The redesign process was initiated by a Discovery Workshop at which CTD facilitated the development of project requirements with PAUSD employees and community members. With a solid blueprint in hand, CTD proceeded to restructure the information architecture, create sophisticated messaging, and design/develop a site that conveys the District's principle of "Excellence by Design", its ongoing commitment to achieve the next level of excellence in education for its students. Read our case study. Read the entire client testimonial. Learn about our Discovery Workshop ( 39K).



	Visa Developers' Conference features CTD speakers Traditionally the Visa Developers' Conference features product-oriented vendor presentations, from companies such as Microsoft, Allaire, and Macromedia. This year, for the first time, a service-oriented firm, Creative Touch Design, was invited. Kristin Johnson, CTD's User Experience Specialist, presented usability best practices while Kathy Chu, CTD's principal, conducted a roundtable discussion on writing effective RFPs. "As a Visa International Preferred Supplier, we've worked on enough Visa projects to know the areas where usability typically suffers. By addressing these points with developers and content owners, we feel we provided some very practical, easy-to-implement advice to improve the overall usability of web sites throughout the organization," said Johnson of her valuable opportunity to demystify usability. Participants in the RFP roundtable received the benefit of Kathy Chu's business experience: "At CTD, we have a proven methodology for defining and clarifying project requirements. We shared this process with Visa content owners to streamline their efforts in writing RFPs and emphasize the value of articulating their needs up front. Well-written RFPs are essentially the beginning of a successful project." The Visa Developers' Conference is a quarterly gathering of content owners and internal developers from across Visa's three business units. The agenda typically focuses on best practices for designing and developing sites within Visa's 50,000+ page intranet, and includes a key presentation by a featured vendor.



	Pro-bono: Bob Mullen Memorial Golf Tournament site helps raise funds for the American Cancer Society Creative Touch Design has donated its services to create the first online presence for The Bob Mullen Memorial Golf Tournament. This charitable event is dedicated to providing a memorable experience for its players, sponsors, and volunteers while contributing 100% of the net proceeds to the American Cancer Society. Sponsored by Morgan Stanley and the ProAction Foundation, this year's Tournament provided participants an opportunity to have "good fun for a great cause" in a world-class setting. The new site is the cornerstone of the Tournament's marketing efforts and was key in establishing credibility and generating interest in the event. Greg Trento, a non-profit partner of the Tournament, said, "CTD also helped us offer maximum convenience to tournament registrants by setting up an ecommerce application to handle online registration and payment. We're tremendously grateful for their contribution to the success of our event this year." Read our case study. Read the entire client testimonial.



	Visa International makes CTD a Preferred Supplier Visa International and Creative Touch Design enhanced their ongoing relationship in September 2002, when Visa International awarded CTD its Preferred Supplier status. "Preferred" status is a special designation within Visa that requires stringent pre-qualification and is based, among other factors, on a supplier's reputation within Visa and its consistent record of high-quality past performance. It is awarded to a select group of suppliers that provides various products and services ranging from office equipment to advertising. CTD has had the good fortune of partnering with Visa since May 2000, on projects ranging from Human Resources to Global Sponsorship & Partnerships. CTD was instrumental in the creation of a site for Visa International's CEO, Christopher Rodrigues), and Scene in Salt Lake, Visa's internal web coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympics—one of their more significant sponsorships. Recent projects include a site for the Visa Commercial Solutions group, and the Visa Look, Tone, and Feel web site outlining Visa International's online branded look and feel guidelines for Visa's 50,000+ page corporate intranet. And recently completed is an upgrade to Visa USA's Partnership Marketing Calendar, which includes the addition of personalized end-user access and inventory tracking. Created by CTD, this database-driven web tool catalogs and disseminates executive hospitality opportunities available through Visa's world-class partnerships.


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