FILM · PHOTOGRAPHY · WEB · COMMUNICATIONS
Making the People Behind the Mission Visible
What began as a turnkey website redesign grew into a continuing creative relationship: helping CEPEDA make its technical work clearer, its employee-owners more visible, and its story more consistent across photography, film, web, and communications.
CEPEDA
CEPEDA Associates is a Louisville-based engineering and manufacturing company providing mission-critical products and services to the U.S. Navy. For more than 40 years, the company has manufactured, serviced, and upgraded life-support equipment and complex mechanical components for the submarine fleet.
CEPEDA is an ESOP company—an employee-owned business in which eligible employees share in the company’s ownership through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Its story is inseparable from the engineers, craftspeople, specialists, and support teams whose work shapes the company every day.
Sonora’s Role
Website strategy and design • Squarespace development • Information architecture • Copy development
Visual direction • Commercial photography • Leadership portraits • Film and video production • Organizational storytelling
A Complex Organization Without a Clear Path Through It
CEPEDA’s previous website had grown gradually over many years. As different people added pages and information, the site became a collection of technical content without a clear structure connecting it all.
The redesign needed to serve several audiences at once: Navy and government customers, prospective employees, suppliers, project partners, and others encountering the company for the first time. Each audience needed a straightforward way to understand CEPEDA’s capabilities, but the work itself could not be reduced to vague or overly simplified language.
The challenge was to create order without losing necessary detail—to make a highly technical organization easier to navigate while preserving the accuracy, seriousness, and security its work required.
Clarity Began
with Structure
Before the new website could take shape visually, the information needed a clearer foundation.
Sonora worked with CEPEDA to review years of accumulated content, identify the company’s most important areas of work, and reorganize its products and services into a simpler, more useful structure. Related capabilities were brought together, overlapping pages were reduced, and each major category was given a clearer place within the site.
The goal was not to remove the technical depth that mattered to CEPEDA’s customers. It was to create a path through it.
That structure became the framework for the redesigned website, giving government customers, prospective employees, suppliers, and project partners a more direct way to understand the company and find the information most relevant to them.
One Project, Built From the Ground Up
The original engagement was designed as a turnkey project, bringing the website’s strategy, content, imagery, design, and development together under one creative direction.
Sonora created the complete visual system for the new site, including its typography, color palette, navigation, page layouts, content cards, buttons, graphic elements, and overall visual rhythm. The site was then built in Squarespace and prepared for launch with post-launch revision support.
Copy was developed collaboratively with CEPEDA’s employees. Their technical knowledge was essential to explaining specialized products and services accurately, while Sonora helped shape that information into language that could be understood by a wider audience.
Some products and processes also required careful review because of security concerns. Photography, video, and written content had to communicate the substance of CEPEDA’s work without revealing information that could not be shown publicly.
Every element of the site—from its structure to its imagery—was created to work together as one coherent expression of the company.
The People Who Own the Work
CEPEDA was already an ESOP company when the new website launched. That shaped the way its people needed to be represented.
The photography could not feel like anonymous industrial imagery or staged corporate promotion. It needed to show real employees engaged in the work: engineering, welding, machining, testing, finishing, collaborating, and solving problems together.
Through CEPEDA’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan, eligible employees share in the ownership and long-term success of the company. The quality of the work, the care taken with resources, and the decisions made throughout the organization can contribute to a shared outcome.
The new website placed those employee-owners at the center of CEPEDA’s visual story—not simply as the workforce behind the organization, but as people with a meaningful stake in its future.
Showing the Organization as It Really Works
Sonora photographed CEPEDA inside the environments where its work actually happens.
The resulting image library included engineers developing technical solutions, craftspeople welding and assembling equipment, employees working through testing and quality processes, teams collaborating across departments, and individuals concentrating on the details of their craft.
Portraits were created for every member of CEPEDA’s management and leadership team for the website’s About section. A full-company group photograph brought the entire workforce together in a single image, presenting the organization not as an abstract defense contractor, but as a community of employee-owners.
These photographs became more than supporting visuals. They helped explain the company.
Visitors could see the scale of the workplace, the range of disciplines involved, and the human skill behind the products and services described throughout the site.
A Digital Home for a Technical Story
The completed website gave CEPEDA a clearer way to present the breadth of its capabilities.
Its services were organized into approachable categories such as engineering and design, Navy-approved welding, large-scale custom machining, nondestructive testing, product testing, quality and compliance, and customer service. Its product lines were given a similarly coherent structure.
Original photography gave each area of the site a direct connection to CEPEDA’s people and working environment. Technical information was no longer separated from the employees responsible for carrying it out.
The result was a digital home designed to serve multiple audiences without losing the company’s identity—technical enough for knowledgeable customers, accessible enough for new visitors, and human enough to reflect the culture behind the work.
From One Project to the Next
After the website launched, CEPEDA returned to Sonora for a short-form film centered on one employee and her reasons for choosing to work for the company.
The film was later presented in Washington, D.C., before an audience that included government officials and U.S. Navy personnel. Rather than focusing only on equipment or technical capabilities, the piece gave an employee the opportunity to speak in her own voice about the organization.
That assignment became the first of several individual projects that continued the relationship beyond the website.
Since then, the work has expanded to include ongoing staff and group photography, short-form video production, departmental stories, new-hire communications, and additional assignments shaped around CEPEDA’s evolving needs.
Each project has its own purpose, but all of them draw from a growing understanding of the organization, its people, and the responsibilities behind its work.
A Deeper Story in Progress
The relationship has now grown into a long-form documentary project built around CEPEDA’s people, history, culture, and ESOP identity.
The film brings together leadership and employee interviews with documentary footage from throughout the workplace. Employees have been invited to reflect on their roles, their pride in the work, the history they have witnessed, and what it means to contribute to an employee-owned company.
The documentary is also creating space for voices and experiences that may not ordinarily appear in formal corporate communications. Technical knowledge, personal memories, departmental perspectives, and stories from across the organization can be preserved alongside the visual record of the work itself.
The project remains in production.
Preserving More Than the Present
Alongside the current photography and documentary work, Sonora has begun digitizing CEPEDA’s archival photographs.
The images offer a record of the company’s earlier people, equipment, facilities, and milestones. Preserving them protects more than physical photographs; it helps retain the institutional memory behind the organization.
Together, the historical archive, present-day photography, and employee interviews are beginning to form a broader visual record—connecting the people building CEPEDA today with the work and relationships that shaped it over time.
Confirmation before publication: CEPEDA should approve the framing of this work as part of a broader institutional record or emerging visual archive.
The Value of Familiarity
CEPEDA continues to engage Sonora through individual projects rather than a formal retained relationship. Even so, each new assignment benefits from the understanding developed through the work that came before it.
There is less need to begin from the surface.
Sonora already understands the general structure of the organization, the visual language established through the website, the importance of the ESOP model, the technical and security considerations surrounding the work, and the care required when photographing or interviewing employees.
That familiarity creates continuity across different forms of communication. A photograph, website page, employee film, or documentary interview may serve a different immediate need, but each can still feel connected to the same honest and recognizable story.
One Story. Many Forms.
The CEPEDA relationship demonstrates why Sonora brings multiple creative disciplines together.
The website required strategy before design. The writing required listening and technical collaboration. The photography needed to communicate both craftsmanship and employee ownership. The films created room for employees to speak in their own voices. The archival work connects the present organization to its history.
Each form serves a different purpose.
Together, they help CEPEDA communicate not only what it makes, but who makes it, how the work is carried out, and why the people behind it matter.