Mood Boards

We’ve been working with garden designer Lisa Cox for almost a year now, and were delighted when she asked us to create a new website for her.

Over the past ten months or so we’ve helped Lisa carve out a niche for herself in a very crowded market; put together a marketing plan to help get her new business off the ground, and created various pieces of tactical marketing collateral for her – such as a direct mail piece and blog. We’d held off on designing Lisa a new website initially – partly because Lisa wanted to be sure she had enough funds in place to do the job properly, and partly because her existing site was fine. Lisa’s business has changed so much in such a short space of time that it’s actually made a lot of sense to do the site right now.

Lisa is also a Colour Psychology practitioner just like us – which has made working on this project extra interesting! We’ve been able to have a good debate about which season she falls into (Summer side of Autumn) and how that translates through to her website design.

I’m going to show you the various stages of this design – from our initial mood board right through to final design over the next few posts. I hope you’ll see how we go from concept, to great design, to (hopefully) powerful design as we take Lisa’s feedback and produce something that not only looks great, but feels like her.

The Current Website

the homepage design as it stands right now

Lisa’s existing website is smart, professional and well designed. And I guess that’s why we’ve left it so long. There’s nothing dreadful about it, and so in terms of where to invest the budget first, the website just wasn’t a priority.

current website design

But that doesn’t mean that the website was working for Lisa.

current website design

For a start it’s a Flash website, which is not only incredibly annoying whilst it loads; doesn’t work on an iPad or iPhone (to the best of my knowledge at least) and is very un-search engine friendly! Those reasons alone make it compelling to switch. But add to that the fact that Lisa can’t change her website *at all* and you have a pretty significant issue.

In terms of design, although it looked smart and was “good” design, it wasn’t powerful. It wasn’t sending out the right signals for Lisa. It was very male, very shiny (not great when you’re dealing in garden design!) and very small…

So it was time to switch. We started with a planning and mood board session combined. An extra long and very inspirational session where we researched, focused, debated and planned. We thought hard about how visitors should travel around the site, what they’d want to know and what made Lisa different. Luckily because we’d covered a lot of “getting to know you” ground in the marketing work we’d been doing, it was more a case of catching up on what’s new rather than a full new brief. The mood board was, as ever, such a powerful way of really getting to the heart of what Lisa wanted to communicate.

Back in a mo with the first set of designs…

Tagged as in Case Studies, From The Studio, Mood Boards, Web Design

Mood boards, vision boards, design boards – call them what you will, they’re not a new concept. Used by graphic designers, coaches, interior designers the world over mood boards help you to clarify what’s important to you, visualise what it is you’re striving for and help you to communicate.

We love mood boards at Flourish, for the very reasons I’ve stated above. And tomorrow I’ll be leading a group of 8 small business owners through creating their own mood boards for their businesses as a part of my branding workshop. I can’t wait! If there’s one session I get truly, hoppingly excited about it’s a mood board session.

I love mood boards because they help us understand our client, their objectives and how they’d like their brand to feel. It’s so important to us that we create a brand identity for a client that feels right as well as looks great and mood boards really unlock the gap between what a client says they want (or even thinks they want) and what they actually want.

They also help both us and the client gain a lot of clarity around their business – you can almost hear the penny drop or the lightbulb ping as we work through the session and things start to emerge. I really love the way these sessions enrich our creativity and enable us to deliver a very creative and appropriate brand identity for our client.

Intangible businesses – management consultancy like at Customer Essential or a service like at the Mind Boutique – they are very difficult to draw. At times like that you need some creative inspiration if we’re to avoid trudging down the well worn stock photography path. Mood boards really spark our creativity and help us enrich the end result.

Finally everyone that has taken part in these sessions loves the fact that they’ve been a part of the process. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said afterwards “I thought you’d gone mad, charging me for cutting and sticking but that was the most powerful, creative thing I’ve done in a long while”.

It’s not just the mood board itself that helps, it’s the whole process. It’s not just about what goes on the board, it’s about what doesn’t make the final cut too. It’s the clarification at the beginning that comes to life as we work through the session. It’s the emotive responses we have to images, colours and words. It’s the passionate discussion, the lively debate and the understanding. What’s not to like?

Tagged as , brand identity surrey, logo design in guildford, mood board in Branding, Logo Design, Mood Boards

Regular readers of our Flourishing Blog probably can’t fail to have noticed our excitement surrounding the relaunch of wedding jewellery design company Yarwood White’s website. We launched the site with a flourish back in December but had been working on the rebrand and reposition of the business for several months prior to planning the website.

With a bit of breathing space finally I thought it was time to share with you how the new identity came into being. It’s funny, because writing this post with the benefit of hindsight I can see that, for me at least, there is a clear cut winner from the initial concepts, it suits the brand so well. Of course at the time, things weren’t quite so straightforward!

Yarwood-White is one of the UK’s leading bridal jewellery design companies. Well known for her attention to detail, stylish design and celebrity clients, two babies in two years had taken its toll on Clare’s business. Competitors had flooded the market, emulating many of Yarwood-White’s designs, marketing material and undercutting her on price. Creative Director Clare was ready to “get back in the race” – redefine her brand position and create a website that helped her business grow, as well as becoming more efficient at the back end.

Redefining the niche…

When Clare first launched her business she had a clear niche in the market, but times change, competitors move in, your proposition develops and changes and you suddenly realise that what seemed so clear has become a little bit muddy. We started by working with Clare and her team on their niche. We worked through a couple of Marketing Mentoring sessions to establish exactly what made the company unique, what they wanted to be known for and what their clients wanted. We also balanced that against competitor offerings and carved out a niche that we were all comfortable with.

Visualising the plan

It’s all very well having ideas in your mind, but they needed to be translated and Yarwood-White is an established brand so we couldn’t take any chances with the redesign. We started with a team Flourish-Yarwood-White mood board session which helped clarify our thoughts further and interestingly the colour palette emerged through the session. We were unsure about whether Yarwood-White should be summer (as previously) or Autumn or even Winter. We settled with the Summer side of Autumn which I think is the right place to be. And interestingly although we didn’t expressly set out to use purple and turquoise, they emerged in the mood board and certainly make sense in terms of what they say: quality, vision, innovation, creativity.

So on with the designs… As a team we brainstormed a number of concepts and these four made the final cut…

Concept One

In hindsight I can see that this was too prissy, floaty, not strong enough. At the time it seemed like something worth exploring, especially given that we were rebranding from a very soft, Summery identity. Here’s the logo in context.

Concept Two

I remember the studio being split on this one, as was the feedback from Clare’s contacts. Many loved the distinctive style. For me it was too twee… Interesting to see the old website in the context of this logo – all Chloe has changed is the logo in the header.

Concept Three

I still love this concept. We tweaked the colours and refined the typography but I love its’ confidence and strength as well as the creative flair in the icon.

The phrases didn’t make it into the final cull… But we quite liked the concept!

Concept Four

I loved this one. I loved the beauty of the icon and the strength in the type. I also loved the colour combinations. That said, I think the right concept won!

So with a colour palette tweak or two and a few typography refinements I present to you the finished Yarwood-White logo…

Tagged as in Branding, Case Studies, Colour Psychology, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Mood Boards

This post has been a looooong time coming and I am delighted to finally share with you the new Yarwood-White website. Clare Yarwood-White runs a very successful jewellery design business. Over the past six years she’s scooped numerous awards and can count the likes of Danni Minogue, Cheryl Cole and Diana Vickers amongst her clients. [...]

Tagged as , bridal jewellery company redesign, website design, yarwood-white in Branding, Case Studies, Colour Psychology, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Marketing, Mood Boards, Online Marketing, Web Design, Websites

Last week we had the pleasure of working with the lovely Andri Benson on a mood board session. Andri is a Wedding Planner and with her son now at school was very keen to up her game and move her business, Always Andri, forwards for the new year. Andri popped in for a branding consultation a [...]

Tagged as in Branding, Case Studies, Colour Psychology, From The Studio, Mood Boards

On Monday I ran a mood board session with one of the most experiential and inspiring people I’ve worked with all year. Tim Martin, Harley Street hypnotherapist and lifestyle coach has been working with us on his brand strategy and marketing planning for the past couple of weeks. Yesterday it was time to get our [...]

Tagged as , hypnotherapy logo design, nlp logo design, the mind boutique in Branding, Business Strategy, Colour Psychology, Logo Design, Marketing, Mood Boards

Sysco Guest Supply are a multi billion dollar business who supply amenities such as bubble bath and shampoo to hotel chains like the Marriot and Hilton worldwide. To say that they’re upmarket bubble bath suppliers probably doesn’t do them quite justice! They have an impressive portfolio of both clients and suppliers and are responsible for [...]

Tagged as , creative brainstorming, mood board, sysco guest supply in Case Studies, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Mood Boards

We first worked with Liezl a year ago when we did a quick spruce up of her logo design and colours to better help her appeal to her ideal clients. Since then a lot has moved on with Liezl! She has since given up her day job and is ready to focus on building up [...]

Tagged as in Branding, Case Studies, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Mood Boards

Liberty of London is for me an iconic brand. An uber-brand that manages to not only sell beautiful product, but also carries a lot of brand equity in it’s own right. I mean, the other day I found a Liberty carrier bag on eBay for four pounds. Has the world gone mad? Four pounds (plus [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, Mood Boards

I’ve just spent two weeks travelling up and down the West Coast of America. Nowhere enormously ambitious in stateside terms – a week chilling in Mission Viejo, in Orange County, followed by a drive up to the Napa Valley for a spot of wine tasting, followed by a whistlestop tour of San Francisco, down Highway [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, Mood Boards