Challenge
Billy Grubbs founded State Film Lab to bring film processing to Louisville during the revival of analog photography in the early 2010s. He needed a logo and a website, but the website had a problem most labs hadn’t solved: how do you let customers order online when every roll of film has a dozen variables?
Approach
For the logo, I wanted something that felt handmade, analog, and true to the medium. I designed the initial mark digitally, then carved a linocut version by hand, printing and digitizing multiple editions with the genuine roughness of hand printing. I scanned, composited, and vectorized the result to achieve a stamp-like mark with texture that was real not simulated.
For the website, I designed a clean, stark layout to let the photography lead. Then I built a custom ordering configurator in WordPress to replace the PDF order forms most labs were still using. Customers could select their film process (C-41 vs. black and white), choose their film stock, and work through an accordion interface to specify service variations, push/pull processing, and other options, all without printing a single page.
