Hartzell Air Movement

Trophies, Web Design

Hartzell Air Movement is a ventilation equipment manufacturer based in Piqua, OH that prides itself on its Midwestern heritage. Hartzell has been making fans, ducts, and propellors in America for six generations. The Hartzell brand uses a timeless style that communicates Hartzell’s history in the Rust Belt.

Through my contracted freelance position at Real Art Design Group in Dayton, I contributed to physical and digital projects for Hartzell Air Movement. Hartzell wanted to create a sales award trophy to reward their top-selling distributors each year. The award needed to reflect the brand’s industrial style, showcase their product, and be personalizable to each recipient. Working with an excellent team of fabricators and project managers, we devised a trophy composed of a metal back representing a fan blade and a base made from red oak sourced from Hartzell’s sibling company, Hartzell Hardwoods. The base is modular so that new year blocks can be added for subsequent achievements. The trophy’s centerpiece is a model of one of Hartzell’s best-selling fans complete with a chip insert showcasing the recipient’s name.

A detailed shot of the silk screened graphics on the back panel.

I oversaw production design for the trophies and coordinated a number of aspects of the project. From setting the final meaurements of the pieces to choosing wood stock for the base and designing the graphics on the back panel, I was involved from start to finish. Coordination required keeping separate vendors on schedule to die cut the metal panel, silk screen the graphics, and produce the vinyl name stickers on time as well as 3D printing the fan model and assembling the trophies in house.

My work for Hartzell also included web design for two pages on hartzellairmovement.com. The “Hartzell Difference” page outlines the qualities that set Hartzell apart from other manufacturers. The brand’s history, commitment to quality, and excellent customer service are all highlighted on the page. Designing the page required prototyping a responsive layout that could easily be handed off to the development team for creation and retouching photos given to us by the team at Hartzell. The page has discrete sections with varying text and image layouts that keep the viewer engaged.

In addition to the creating the Hartzell Difference page, I was tasked with streamlining the Hartzell History page. The page’s original layout consisted of a clunky card system oversaturated with dates and no heirarchy between important milestones and minor developments. As a company that prides itself so much on its heritage, I wanted to show the viewer Hartzell’s history of craftsmanship. I was given access to an archive of images and schematics and created a collage in Hartzell’s industrial style to use as a header image and worked with Hartzell personnel to choose specific dates to call out in their own section.