Our History
Sway Design started in 1999 when I moved back to New York after living in Seattle for two years where I was the director of a children's art school and taught drawing and painting to teenagers. I had done some marketing and graphic design for the school including working with a design firm to launch the school's first website. When I returned to New York, a number of friends in the Arts asked me to design logos and brochures for them so I began doing print projects for documentary films, theater productions and educational workshops. A year later I was asked by the advertising firm D’Arcy BOS Group to create branding projects in Flash and HTML for Sony and Sprint so I quickly learned everything I could about the web and began transitioning into interactive technologies.
A year later United Way asked me to redesign their web templates, refine their interactive brand standards and design an instructional web site for their national network of local organizations. The project was a huge challenge and I learned everything I could about web standards so that the new site would be useful to United Way’s local chapters and present up to date "best practices" for online content development.
Since 2000 I've continued working with non-profits, educational organizations and universities as well as for-profit companies. Using the web as an educational tool has been a constant theme throughout almost all of the projects I've taken on. The websites I've created teach people a variety of skills including; how to use technology in the classroom, how to engage in the voting process, how artists go about creating their work and how to be socially responsible when purchasing products online.
The two years I spent teaching drawing and painting to teenagers honed my communication skills. In a hands on way, I learned the importance of clear, direct communication. I use these same skills for my for-profit clients to help them educate the public about their mission, their brands, the products they sell and the services they offer that make them unique.
- Ellis Neder