Part of my job here at Hashrocket is to not only provide design support on projects, but to introduce design into the culture. While my day-to-day mostly focuses on the web and related fields of design, I can’t help but find ways to try and design things that aren’t normal for a web development firm. Things that can help us stand out in the sea of development firms out there.

This poster series is an initiative developed during our rebranding effort. While most people consider branding purely an aesthetic exercise, we understand and believe that branding also drives action. We wanted to introduce things into our culture that helped reinforce our company’s values of craftsmanship and quality. While something more digital would be expected, I wanted to go with something that not only expressed these concepts in the piece, but in the medium itself. Hashrocket hand-screened posters seemed to fit that criteria perfectly.

If you’re not familiar with screen printing, it’s a very hands-on process where instead of using a traditional printing press to print on paper, you isolate each color of the design and run them individually by hand. It introduces a very human element to the designs and reinforces the idea of hand crafted design.

The concept for this poster was to communicate how hard it is to make something simple. The amount of craft and hard work it takes to make complex ideas and processes into simple interfaces for you to enjoy is often overlooked on the web. So I partnered with my good friends Levi Ratliff and Kendrick Kidd at Halftone Def Studios to help realize this concept and leverage their expertise in screen printing.

Having Levi and Kendrick on the case really made this concept possible. They’re amazing at what they do, and I can’t thank them enough for seeing this through with me. So after a couple long nights, here is the final product.

We only printed 30 of these posters and have been giving them out at different conferences and events in the past month or so. We have a couple left but the idea was to only make limited amounts and give them out to people we respected in the industry, clients and friends. Mass-producing these and giving them to everyone would’ve defeated the purpose of this series. So if you didn’t happen to get one of these, stay tuned because we will be continuing to make posters on different topics in the future.