Oh, one more thing before I present the concepts. The name may conjure up twee connotations but Love is actually Jo’s real name! So banish all thoughts of cutesy hearts within the O; this is oh so much more stylish and directional…

Concept One

We worked on this project alongside another for Love Interiors for a brand called Broom & Love. We treated each like a fashion design brand with diffusion range, with Love Interiors being the more playful and youthful diffusion brand. Broom & Love is currently on hold and Jo has asked me not to blog the designs (which I’m a bit gutted about as they are stunning) – hopefully one day you’ll get to see them!

I think this design perfectly highlights the diffusion element – the playfulness of breaking up the word as well as the stylish font. It’s very strong and aspirational isn’t it?

Concept Two

Categorically my personal favourite, I love the mix of colours and the font choices here. Oh, and the iconic logo as well as the handwriting font. Again, it has that very fashiony directional feel about it doesn’t it?

Concept Three

And the final concept. Jo is still thinking through which concept works best for her business so in the meantime I’d love to know what you think?

How gorgeous does the finished Pomegranate logo design look? The photo above is from our shoot for our new website with Matt Pereira and I styled it very quickly to bring out the essence of the colour and style.

We have all loved working on this project: from our initial concepts at the start right through to the finished result we’ve really enjoyed the challenge of creating something that is contemporary and aspirational whilst at the same time retaining some Arabic roots. I blogged a while back about why this project meant something to me personally and whilst this is most definitely not a Persian pastiche, I’m pleased that we managed to capture the essence of the Middle East whilst still making it very relevant to Britain today.

The team have worked so hard on this project and Nicole has been a pleasure to work with. I’d love your thoughts! Is it what you expected when you saw the mood board all those weeks back?

I’m delighted to be able to share these logo and brand identity design concepts for Essentialis. Remember Isabel Nieto from our introduction a few weeks back? Well we have been beavering away in the studio and created three very strong, elegant and confident logo designs for Essentialis. I’m going to share the initial three concepts with you and then I’m going to ask Chloe to blog the finished design as she has the inside track on the journey.

Remember the brief? Isabel Nieto provides a service to ambitious jetsetting executives looking to achieve their first international role. What these execs often find is that their lack of understanding of the nuances of the English language often means they miss out on opportunities either because they miss the subtleties in the questions being asked or they don’t present themselves as effectively as they might. As an ex City worker and expat herself, Isabel is ideally placed to help these candidates prepare their CV’s, job applications and prepare themselves for interview effectively and get that job!

We needed to create a brand identity that was highly aspirational, confident and also with a masculine edge to it. Here are the concepts…

Concept One

I love the strength and dynamism of the patterns here and the energy that comes across. The icon is perhaps a little controversial? But that’s something that can always be tweaked at the design stage.

Concept Two

More feminine but still strong and bursting with corporately ambitious energy!

Concept Three

This is my personal favourite: I love the pattern and the strength and elegance in the icons, although I think if this was the one for Isabel we’d need to add more colour.

Over to you. Which speaks to you the most? Which do you like and which do you feel is right for the brief?

The Hanging Space rebrand was all about capturing the energy and creativity of Elaine Palmer, reflecting the high end and bespoke nature of their work, and the discerning Weybridge client base. Easy eh?

Concept One

I loved this concept: for me it was the perfect combination of Weybridge + Elaine. The glamour and elegance of the upmarket Surrey town combined with the flair and creativity of Elaine.

Concept Two

I love the simple elegance of this logo and it’s femininity. Chloe has played with the space in the letters to give a nod to the company’s business activities but the over riding feeling is upmarket, aspirational and glamorous.

Concept Three

Gorgeous. Elegant, upmarket and feminine. In the end, this was the right logo for Elaine and Hanging Space, and in my next post you’ll see how it all comes together.

Rebranding should be fun

We really believe that when you rebrand your business, it should be fun. It should be about reconnecting you with your passion for your business, inspiring you with what’s possible and giving you the strength and confidence to really move forwards.

I was thrilled to receive an email from Elaine saying:

Just wanted to say that thanks to you “I love my business again” ….and that is what you offer to people like myself…

Isn’t that lovely?

I’ve been looking forward to sharing this project with you for quite some time now and I’m just delighted to be able to reveal the Hanging Space rebrand and new website design. This has been quite an extensive project, with a rebrand, new website design and shopfront design so I’ll be splitting this out over a couple of posts just so I don’t overwhelm you!

Elaine Palmer is the creative force behind Hanging Space, a Weybridge, Surrey based company who design and build bespoke, fitted furniture. The Hanging Space product is incredibly high end and bespoke, and their original website design just didn’t communicate that.

The original website

Elaine originally came to us with a very cool and clever logo she’d just had designed with another agency, ready to have us create a gorgeous and commercial website design. After much planning we developed a stunning design for the homepage as well as some really cool ideas for the site structure.

Iteration One

Whilst the logo ticked many of the boxes, as time went on, Elaine realised that it just didn’t feel right. And I get that – Elaine is highly creative and very feminine, and is working in a very high end market and so whilst the logo looked smart, it made sense to look at the logo design. The funky logo you see above is certainly very clever conceptually (the font plays on the idea of space, as does the icon) but it feels very masculine and cold.

Our philosophy is that when you connect you with your business and your customer you create a brand that’s incredibly powerful. I always think there’s a lot that you can do with a brand identity without necessarily needing to change a logo, but as Elaine was having a new shopfit and sign it made sense to be sure that this was right. And so she invited us to create a new logo design for her. I want to share that with you next.

Pomegranate will sell contemporary homewares and gifts initially online but also in the future through their own shops in some very glamorous parts of the world. The brief was to create a contemporary brand identity with an Arabic twist, take a look and see what you think.

Concept One

Bold, iconic and simple.

We created an icon that represents a flourishing pomegranate, showing the petals of the flower as well as the seeds within the fruit. We then paired this illustration style with a very distinctive font that hints gently towards an Arabic feel without being blatant, and introduced tactility through woven imagery and a simple weave pattern.

The safest of the three, this one has a definite Arabic feel without being too much of a pastiche doesn’t it?

Concept Two

The wild card of the bunch!

Tactile, honest and playful, we wanted to show an alternative layout for the logo that played on the ‘O’. There’s a gorgeous quirkiness to this design that explores the pomegranate as a sumptuous and rich fruit. The inside of the pomegranate has a jewel-like texture that we were keen to explore in this illustration style.

Concept Three

Creative, energetic, distinctive and sensory.

We’ve worked with the concept of the pomegranate flower again for this design but in a very different, hand-painted style. A very sensory brand style that captures your imagination and explores an adventurous mix of the vibrant colours from the palette.

Now it’s over to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Which of these logo designs resonates with you the most?

Each concept has been borne out of the idea of light or illuminating things. Some obvious, some more subtle.

Concept One

Love this colour palette and the beautiful brand patterns.

Concept Two

I love the chink of light that shines through the “window” in the logo. It’s all created as a vector file so would be fully scaleable and could also work as a solid colour (albeit without the light chink!) if required.

Concept Three

This was Laila’s favourite concept: strong yet feminine. We’re currently in the process of amending colours and tweaking bits here and there, so I will certainly share very soon!

What do you think? I love them!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve shared with you some of the brands that I love, and the reasons why. We’ve also looked at some of the learnings you can take into your own business and I hope that I’ve started to inspire you about how you can make your brand more engaging, more fun and perhaps more sticky.

But how do you make those lessons your own? Aside from the legalities of copying someone you admire, it just doesn’t make good business sense. Branding is all about differentiating yourself from your competitors, making yourself irresistible to your ideal clients and communicating in a way that makes people ache to work with you.

There’s a concept in design that no idea is ever new, that we’re constantly taking inspiration from what has gone before and building on it to create something fresh and new.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

Great design doesn’t just happen. Inspiration is all around us, and being good at what we do is about opening our eyes to what’s out there and creating a mental scrapbook of ideas, ready to call upon when the time is right.

The skill, for me, is in being able to make the appropriate links to inspiration and creating something that is inspired by, rather than slavishly copying, one or a multiple of trends. I often see ideas that are ‘inspired by’ something that just doesn’t fit with the company’s brand. And you know what? It doesn’t work, it feels awkward. Wrong somehow.

If you’re opening your eyes up to your branding then you need to take your inspiration from much of what’s around you. But then you need to put your own twist on it. If you don’t, it won’t be authentic. I was watching a video for Creative Live which Jasmine Star was presenting and she said something really powerful:

(I’m paraphrasing here)

“I’ve shown you how I did me. Now you need to work out how to do you.”

You can see the full video here.

And that for me is the essence of a great brand. Don’t put illustrations on your website because you like ours and you want a piece of it. Don’t wear (as Jasmine puts it) flare white jeans because she does. Don’t use that font because you’ve seen someone else using it and it seems to be working for them. Put your own spin on it, work out how you’re going to do you.

And so as you look through websites and cuttings of the brands that inspire you, look at what they do, what appeals to you and ask yourself why it works. But most importantly, ask yourself what your take is going to be.

You have to put your spin on things, and be able to walk away from an idea that you love because it doesn’t work for your brand.

So embrace the inspiration, keep your mind open to ideas, but know when to say no as much as yes.

I’m going to share the development of this across a couple of posts as we really need your input moving forwards. But first up, the initial designs and brainstorming.

Avatar Marketing Inc is a startup marketing business that offers marketing services to Canadian SME’s. Laila Zichmanis has a strong background in marketing and brand strategy, having previously worked for Procter and Gamble, amongst other organisations. Laila is now turning her attention to the SME market, another sector with which she has plenty of passion and experience.

The Brief

Laila’s brief was very simple at it’s heart: simplicity, passion and marketing science. Laila isn’t delivering the creative side of marketing (yet) – her focus is on the strategy, planning and implementation.

Here are our initial ideas and colour palette.

Concept One

I love the simplicity and passion of this concept. It also has a touch of science about it.

The font choice for this logo was selected for it’s simplistic class, clarity and strength.

The symbolised flower within the logo (avatar) represents communication, efficiency and could potentially portray the variety of sectors within Laila’s business.

Concept Two

With this concept we have manipulated a clean sans serif font. By creating lots of space between each letter and elongating some of the type we generated the ideal suggestion of integrity, purity and growth.

Laila’s scientific and analytical approach to the way you work is a quality that resonated with the team when we brainstormed. We were keen to show her an option that communicated this in a modern and feminine way.

Concept Three

The typeface for this concept was selected for it’s free-flowing forms which depict virtuoso, passion and energy. The colour purple is used for its quality, purpose and vision and when paired with this beautiful font makes for a logo that packs some personality punch!

Laila is going to pursue my personal favourite – concept one, but we need your help in deciding which icon she takes forward. Keep your eyes peeled for my next post as I’m going to ask you to vote

In my experience, the temptation is to go for the logo, and do the website in 6-12 months as funds allow. Now sometimes that’s the right decision, but not always.

If you have a fixed (or lean) budget you need to channel the investment into the items that will make the biggest impact. And if the logo is useable (I’ll clarify that in my next post…), then better to start with website and brand identity and really start changing peoples perceptions quickly.

The fact is that if you do have a fixed budget and want to put your lovely new logo on your less than wonderful website, it’s going to struggle to have the impact it deserves.

But if you can do the website well and if the logo is useable, you’re likely to get a better return on your investment. Good, strategic design is what’s important here. This isn’t about settling for something “new” for the sake of new. It’s about being planning where you want your brand identity to be, the impression you want to create and how you want visitors to respond to the design.

And just to illustrate my point, here’s a couple I made earlier.

Old website design, new logo

Here’s HarveyMaria’s current website with their lovely new logo design. OK so the header looks classier, but there’s a long way to go in terms of design.

New brand identity, old logo

Wow. What a difference!

Now obviously some thought, care and attention has gone into this website design, and the design works because of more than the brand identity. The navigation has been thought through, the functionality and the messaging have been considered, and it all works together to create a coherent, useable, aspirational look.

But look again at the design. This is a great example of the power of a strong brand identity. We’ve worked hard to develop a look and feel for HarveyMaria that extends beyond their logo (in fact, do you see that I’ve cheekily superimposed their old logo onto the mockup?). The old logo barely makes an impact – it’s the brand identity that’s really making the difference: the fonts, the colour palette and the image styles. The devices we’ve used to draw attention to certain parts of the design.

The point is that it’s the whole that matters, not just the pretty logo stuck up in the top left hand corner. And the whole – when it’s planned and executed well is your brand identity. Thoughtful design, with colours, typography and images that support your business message.

And there is a very big difference between redesign a website and developing a brand identity whilst working on a website design but I think that’s another story for another day…

What do you think. If you had a fixed budget would you invest in the logo, the brand identity or the website?