Whispering Winds is a Catholic camp and conference center located in the heart of the beautiful Cuyamaca Mountains about an hour outside of San Diego. Their mission is to bring people together to strengthen bonds through faith, and form them with nature.

Chef Terry Paulding and her team were tasked with teaching us how to prepare a full-course meal consisting of items and ingredients some of us have never heard of, and they nailed it. While some of our Comrades took right to cooking, others were more interested in enjoying the various aromas and sampling a few of the wine pairings.

The Interactive Media Association did. They recently honored Comrade and Bank of the West with an Outstanding Achievement Award for our work on the Manage Your Money site – a resource center that helps people find better ways to take care of their finances.

Our new office is located downstairs from our previous office, in the first floor of the Arlington Building. With the move, we were able to bring on more Comrades, add more spacious conference rooms and give Gerard more room for his spontaneous break dancing.

They asked us to develop a new website for the band AND shoot their first music video. Obviously, we wanted in.

We partnered with director Sean Smith and Stingray Pictures to produce the video for the track, “Hollywood,” a dark, yet poignant journey through the inner struggles and fantasies of a young woman’s mind. We shot the video in San Francisco’s famous Musée Mécanique, an antique penny arcade whose ominous, carnivalesque appearance helped create a unique visual tone for the video.

Because of our previous branding experience, we knew that we needed to review both brands in depth to find the right mixture of elements, without confusing customers and creating a site that was off strategy.

We created a foundation for the bank’s Facebook presence that focuses on the fun side of banking, while emphasizing Bank of the West’s core values of community, relationships and service. The bank does a lot of charitable work and sponsors various events in the communities they serve, which they can now share with the Facebook community. They also sponsor the Pac-10 Conference, and we’re pleased to say that they now have a venue for sharing relevant promotions and unique Pac-10 content with fans.

That was the challenge for BW Insurance Agency, the insurance arm of Bank of the West. Because BW Insurance Agency is a part of the bank, yet still a separate entity, they wanted us to help them develop a unique web presence to showcase their unique image without completely separating from Bank of the West.

So when they asked us to build their corporate website to help them tell their story, of course we wanted in on this international venture.

With offices in Hong Kong, Connecticut and San Francisco, InvestLab’s mission is to provide a platform for retail brokerages and everyday investors to explore and trade in global markets that have typically been difficult to access.  The corporate site is designed to help potential backers get to know InvestLab and the scope of their vision. 

We worked to ensure that the Popmoney site communicated a clear direction for users looking to send and receive money, while communicating high-level benefits in a friendly, human voice and maintaining the security and trustworthiness important to this new financial brand.

You can see the site at popmoney.com

A special congrats goes to our friends at CashEdge and all Comrades involved on the project.