Lots of companies keep a law office on retainer – someone to help them iron out the details of an important contract, or take care of the occasional lawsuit.
It’s clear where to go for legal advice, then. But who does a company call when they need help with something a bit more offbeat – like ordering Gumby-esque figurines modeled on the corporate mascot, or designing a hood to shield customers as they fill out a sensitive form?
In those two actual cases, the companies in question turned to Basics Group, a creative-services firm based in Providence. Basics, which specializes in brand identity and communications, offers all the standard services provided by design firms, but the firm’s principals also relish tackling thornier challenges.
“Basically, we have a track record with people we work with over time … where they’re going to us for [obscure] stuff and, chances are, we’re going to figure out how to get it done,” said founder Dwight McMillan. “They don’t know who else to ask, so they ask us.”
That versatility makes Basics Group hard to pigeonhole – the staff does everything from custom databases to event posters – but its core business is Web development.
The Web guru at Basics is Dave Piehler, a 2003 URI graduate who joined Basics after spending two years running his own Web-development firm, where his work included the city of Cranston’s official Web site, which is still in use. His first major project at Basics was the creation of a sophisticated internal Web application for the marketing team at Citizens Financial Group.
These days, the trend online is toward greater simplicity. Piehler has begun building sites with content-management tools so that the organizations can update them more easily.
Piehler works closely with Hallie Steele, a Minneapolis transplant who leads much of the firm’s design efforts. Her work is particularly varied, from new logo and site designs to layouts for the store signage that tells customers which aisle has which products.
On a recent afternoon, Piehler was hard at work designing a new Web site for the Quonset Development Corporation, the quasi-public agency that manages Quonset Port. First, the team from Basics held a series of meetings with people from Quonset to get a sense of what they needed.
From there, Steele created a few mockups of different designs for the new Web site, not only with different looks but also different options for navigation. “We try to give them selections that aren’t just visually different but are also structurally different and conceptually different, too,” she said. Once a design was chosen, Piehler began the process of creating the site’s code.
Steele enjoys the wide variety of clients Basics works with, which include the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, CVS/Caremark and the Rhode Island Builders Association.
“You get to learn a little bit about everything and you kind of have to dig in and understand it a little bit to communicate and tell their story,” she said.
Basics Group was founded in 2003 by McMillan, who said the name came from his dislike for design firms that take themselves extremely seriously and then fail to deliver: “The nature of us being a small team is that we’re [the ones] doing everything.”
“That’s kind of the basis of our name … this principle of everybody’s just out here trying to deliver good service to people based on what skills they have, and it’s really not more complicated than that,” McMillan said.
Basics started out at the Center for Design & Business, a business incubator created by the Rhode Island School of Design and Bryant University. They were in a windowless room so small that Piehler was working off the back of McMillan’s desk.
After that, they tried working remotely for a time, but eventually realized they missed the day-to-day human interaction of an office environment. “The initial thought was, well, we can all be at home and we can video chat – there’s all this stuff available to make it feel like we’re collaborating,” McMillan said.
“But in the end, we all just wanted to have an office to go to and be in the office with other people,” he said. “You need the energy of that, the casual back and forth of that.”
They moved to a new office with big windows and comfortable furniture, and are glad they did. “It’s a lot more fun to work with people in a small office than it is to just work by yourself on your laptop,” Piehler said. •
COMPANY PROFILE
Basics Group
OWNER: Dwight McMillan
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Design and creative services
LOCATIONS: 118 North Main St., Providence
EMPLOYEES: 7
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 2003
ANNUAL SALES: WND
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