Southern California Web and Graphic Design: C2 Design

In 1994, we recognized the importance of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and opened our eyes to its potential. Over the next decade, we watched the Web grow, learning from what works and what doesn't. Our own skills have evolved during this time to emulate the strengths of the most successful web sites: speed, efficiency, clarity, economy, and brevity, all wrapped up in a beautiful, cohesive design.

Over time, many of our clients asked for services beyond the Web, like printwork, packaging, copywriting, research, even model prototyping. We expanded accordingly, upgrading our skills and in-house systems to meet the demand of the most common requests, while allying with printshops, web hosts, and programmers to accommodate other projects on an as-needed basis.

Our approach begins with collecting information relevant to the project. We will discuss the guidelines of the project, including short- and long-term goals, target audience, and expandability and modularity issues. Depending on the project, we will propose several design directions to the client, which are then narrowed down to one. For more information, please see our FAQs page.

Kristie is originally from Upstate New York and graduated in 1993 from SUNY College at Buffalo with a BS in Design. She has pursued art and creativity in one form or another as far back as she can remember. To that end, she moved after college to New York City for a few years working for companies like AOL and Time Life. In pursuit of the bigger and better, she moved to Los Angeles in 1997, landing initially in Venice Beach. Utilizing contacts from New York, she freelanced for AOL as well as others, finally landing a position with Netgateway in Long Beach, CA in 1998. Unfortunately, Netgateway floundered as did many others during the dot-bomb era. So Kristie did freelance projects and temp. work until meeting Gerardo in 2001, creating C2 Design two years later.

In her spare time, Kristie is involved with many animal-advocacy projects including Compassionate Cuisine and the creation of Kristies Kats, a rescue/foster/adoption non-profit. She is currently fostering quite a few furry babies. She also occasionally finds the time to create one-of-a-kind gifts, jewelry, sewing, sketching and maintaining a large scrapbooking collection, among other things. When possible, she enjoys socializing with friends, reading, traveling, cooking, gardening or visiting places like the museum, aquarium or japanese gardens.

Graduating with a bachelor's degree in Industrial (product) Design, Gerardo knows the importance of understanding "why" something should be designed before going ahead to "how" it is going to be designed. His philosophy is keeping things clean and simple, and focusing on telling a good story.

Gerardo began making web sites in 1994, when the first version of Netscape was still in beta mode and Firefox, IE and Safari were yet to be born. After various on-site freelancing assignments, he founded Interknight in 1997, doing both the design and code work for client web sites. In 2003, he and Kristie formed C2 Design, allowing him to concentrate on web development and marketing while expanding the business' scope to include graphic and print design, Kristie's specialty.

Gerardo was born in Quezon City, Philippines, and moved to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. He has been drawing since the age of four and still prefers pen and ink to art tablet. He plays and composes on the piano, loves to watch live jazz, and will discuss politics, philosophy and spirituality with anybody for hours. He is godfather to seven children and has a cat and two turtles. He likes to think that his combined fascination with art, the written word, and architecture, suits his job description quite well.