About the client
Custom Sound Instruments is the Flagstaff, AZ, custom guitar and repair shop of master luthier, Ryan Elewaut.
Being raised in Flag, Ryan was always around as part of the tight-knit Flagstaff musician community (there weren’t a ton of us). Years later he would tap me to make his first site, and we’ve iterated and evolved the design several times since.
Several years On
The 2020 global pandemic spurred the latest iteration. Ryan decided to move his business in a new direction, making a big shift away from his long-standing retail location to a focus on his primary love: guitar creation. In that vein, we simplified the site to focus on his services as a master of the craft, putting a spotlight specifically on being a luthier (guitar custom building) and his repair shop (which in 2020 cleverly switched to a “mail-in” model).
The shift allows him to spend the bulk of his time on his real passions, and we’re both stoked on the results. Despite closing his brick-and-mortar location and shifting away from using his e-commerce to sell retail items, his traffic in 2020 skyrocketed- all organically!
Logo Design
In 2015 I also helped with the branding for CSI, updating a design in dire-need of a facelift. Ryan wanted to keep the guitar shape, but make the brand more professional and polished looking.
I wanted to make the logo look more “hand made” and in that vein created the typography myself by sketching it out, then vectorizing it into Illustrator and cleaning it up.
I even created an animated preloader of the logo that I coded to play before the pages on the site load.
