We're A Human First Creative Agency
We’re here for helping connect people to brands with strategy, visuals, web design, and user experiences. We believe that the best customer experience is the cornerstone of a successful business and we’re here for your online, visual, customer experience.
Two truths we've learned:
We approach every project thinking about the end user (the person who will actually use it). We keep that end user in mind through the entire project. In our combined experiences and in connecting with others, we’ve learned this: the best things, the most successful businesses, best brands, most ingenious products, they are all built with the end user at its start and at their core.
Dote on them
Tell Your Story
Our Story, Our Core Values
Dote was born out of a love of design and human psychology. Dote is the combined experiences and expertise of Sarah Kirby, Cayden Trawick, and Sergio Lainez. Sarah grew up watching her dad and granddad run a small business. She saw the joy and satisfaction they brought to customers. She wanted that. After years of working for other people and doing freelance on the side, she met Cayden and Sergio who shared a similar passion for great design and understanding of getting to the core of amazing customer and client experience.
Meet the Dote Team
We’re a small but mighty team of designers and marketers here to help support your business no matter where you are coast to coast (seriously, we’ll come to you!) and what step you’re at in your business growth.
Hi, I’m Sarah!
I’m a humanist & a designer
I’m the creative director and founder of dote creative agency. I love helping people with good design. I approach each design project thinking about how to make it the best it can possibly be for the human that will interact with it. I have degrees in both psychology and design and I consider it an amazing joy that I get to spend my days helping people by designing logos, websites, and taking photos and videos! I’ve worked with people for over 10 years as a teacher, leader, and designer. I’ve been a formal designer since 2016, but I’ve been designing and creating things for as long as I can remember.
Creative Director & Founder
Cayden Trawick
Designer & Co-Founder
he/him
Hello everyone! My name is Cayden. I am designer, artist, and content designer yes, but I am a human first. Living through a great deal of diversity has fueled my passion for connecting with others to create impactful content. I firmly believe that I can make someone’s day even just a little bit better by sharing kindness. Enthusiastic for positive change, I bring my best self to work each day. Call it contagious, my cheerful outlook and determination to create great content has a lasting impact.
Sergio Lainez
Marketing Strategist & Client Liaison
he/him
Hey! I’m Sergio and I’m a marketing strategist. I studied marketing and communications in Lima Peru, and I fell in love with the world on marketing. I moved to Miami almost a decade ago to meet new people and have more opportunities. Coming to Miami I learned English and Portuguese to stay competitive and be able to communicate with a wide variety of people. I really enjoy helping people communicate, translating, and turning those communications into ideas for marketing.
Your questions answered
Here’s a quick overview of our process:
1. You contact us! We set up a 30-minute chat (video call or phone) where you share your needs and ask your questions.
2. We put together a proposal and price based off of your needs and our conversation.
3. You confirm you want to work with us, sign our contract, and submit your first payment.
4. We send you a “get to know you” questionnaire where we ask questions to understand your business.
5. We start researching and moodboarding. We present these to you on a 30-minute conference call. You give any feedback.
6. You send us any needed copy, existing photos or logos, or anything needed to be included in the project.
7. We make a plan and start creating, sharing our process as we go with weekly updates.
8. We share the final designs with you, and offer 3 revisions.
9. We confirm the most successful version and accept (or set up) the remainder of your payment.
10. We share the final files and/or set the final site to live once the payment is processed.
11. We’re done! We do our embarrassing victory dance! We also make a blog post on the dote site with your beautiful finished project and share your success on our social media!
Timelines vary based on type of projects and your needs, but for the most part:
Logo & Brand Strategy: 2 weeks
Web/UX Design: 3 weeks
Photo/Video: 2 weeks*
Social Media Design/Strategy : 1 week
*dependent on travel for on-loction photo/video and length of video needed
If you have a tighter timeline, let us know – we offer rush packages!
We find it best to have a conversation about your business, needs, timeline, and budget FIRST. This let’s everyone get on the same page and allows us to put together a comprehensive proposal for your business. Once we have that conversation, we give you a price and proposal.
We’re a small business, and we totally understand that budgets and pricing are important! Taking this into account, we offer monthly payment plans. We also can handle your project in “phases” which will give you what you need as you grow.
Regardless of the payment we require a percentage of your payment up front as a deposit.
We allow 3 revisions, although clients seldom need all 3. We have a very extensive “get to know you” phase including a few phone calls, a questionnaire, and lots of check-ins. If you find that you need additional revisions, we offer them at our standard hourly rate of $100/hour.
We’re so glad you asked! We offer design services such as social media design, website updates, on-going print projects, and hosting/site maintenance at a monthly fee.
They’re perfect if you have a need for ongoing design work, but don’t need a full-time designer. We offer our services at a discount rate, help you plan, and ensure your projects are delivered timely, branded, and without the headache of ongoing contracts.
We require that you book an initial branding session with us so we can get to know your brand, style, and voice before we start working together. Our retainer programs are for a 6-month contract. At the end of 6-months, we revisit, re-assess and plan for the next 6-months.
