Branding

OK, OK, I can’t resist it any longer!

For those of you that don’t know, I recently became a happily engaged lady. Nick and I were in New York for Christmas and he popped the question at sunset on Brooklyn Bridge. Utterly romantic, I know. And I said yes.

Since then (as I’m sure most newly engaged ladies experience) I’ve become obsessed with The Wedding and despite it being a good 17 months away, I’ve pretty much planned everything from the style of the invitations to the pins going in the bridesmaids’ hair.

Today I wanted to share something rather beautiful with you that really got me thinking.

By pure coincidence my friend Melanie is getting married in New York this August and I duly received her invitation through the post last week. I was truly taken-aback at how much love, passion and devotion she’d poured into creating her bespoke invitation and I felt completely inspired to a) share it with you all and b) think of ways that we as a business could pass that kind of emotional experience on to other people.

It really made me question why that much love and attention can’t be put into something we give our customers.

Lots of ideas! Where do I start?…

Tagged as , ideas in Inspirations, Powerful Branding

We’ve had such a creative morning in the studio! Brainstorming and mood boarding a new logo for Isabel Nieto’s company Essentialis (thank you so much for your votes – she has settled on the name) as well as reviewing a few concepts for work we’ll be sharing later in the week and having a vision board session with another client. It’s certainly been quite a day!

Essentialis is a company that helps ambitious (mostly male) executives tailor their CV and present themselves effectively to get jobs internationally. We want to create a brand identity that is strong, aspirational and clean. And most of all that has wow about it. You can still engage within the Winter season, although it’s much harder to pull off as if you’re not careful it can end up feeling very cold. We plan to counter that with beautiful typography, by experimenting with icons and by using some fabulous pattern (sparingly) to create something incredibly wow.

A few shots of us brainstorming.

Ian played with watercolour texture and pattern. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of this makes the final cut. And I love those colours! So (literally) red blooded aren’t they?

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

I’m really excited to share our initial concept for Mamami by Chet’s new website design and rebrand. We’ve been working with Chet now for a number of weeks to get to the heart of her brand and come up with a more compelling and irresistible way to communicate with her ideal clients.

Mamami’s Current Website

You often hear me talk about weak, good and powerful design and Chet’s website is a great example of a good design. It looks smart (ok, so I don’t love the legs on the mum but the rest is good), there’s clearly been some thought into the design and it’s well laid out. It’s only when you step aside and gain a strong vision for the brand that you realise the missed opportunities. And this is why I get so excited about what we do. Because we can see the vision for a brand and how we can communicate more effectively when the client can only see what’s in front of them. And it’s this vision (and ability to execute the vision) that has a huge impact on a business.

Strategist extraordinare, Bronwyn, worked on the brand positioning and ideal client: the career woman who needs a classic bag to take her from baby classes to the gym to lunch with friends, a business meeting with the bank manager and back to the playdate again. And came up with the fabulous strapline: Beautiful on Purpose.

Chloe has then led the design which totally reworks the brand identity into something much more aspirational, editorial and desirable.

Initial Homepage Design

This homepage mockup is the first stage, we now need to take Chet’s feedback on board and refine this design as well as create templates for the product pages and category page (this is an ecommerce site). But we’re excited! And I know that Chet is incredibly excited too…

The logo stays the same for now, but isn’t it interesting the impact that all the elements around a logo can have? Often we get asked to redesign a logo when in actual fact it’s the brand identity that needs attention. The editorial font, strong colours and stylish shapes really create a look and feel that we’ve planned will appeal directly to Chet’s ideal client. I can’t wait to see the impact it has when the site goes live!

Tagged as in Branding, Rebranding, Web Design

Following on from my last post about Arabic typography, I’ve been spending time looking into patterns that tickle my design taste buds and tie in well with the Arabic theme. Whilst the theme is important, in this instance it’s equally important that it doesn’t become overwhelming so I’ve been thinking carefully about how I can use [...]

Tagged as in Branding, Graphic Design

Over the past week I have been working on an exciting new website design for the stylish baby changing bag company Mamami. The design is still a work in progress so I will be revealing that later on but in the meantime I wanted to share a snippet which uses a watercolour brush stroke created [...]

Tagged as in Branding, Graphic Design

    I am a huge believer in brainstorming because it enables you to put all your ideas to paper; by converting them you can quickly establish what is working. Since working here at Flourish I have been truly inspired by the power of a mood board session because I can see how incredibly important it [...]

Tagged as in Mood Boards

  As you’re probably aware we are currently going through some design changes and I have been given the exciting task of illustrating our new icons. We have been working really hard to develop our own style that capture’s the essence of our brand. Over the coming weeks I would like to share with you our new illustrations, whilst at the same time [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, Graphic Design

I think (I hope) we’ve had a bit of a breakthrough today with the Flourish branding. We were getting so stuck, going round and round in circles trying to create something that looks better than the website we have, but with the spirit of the original brand identity. I think we were all really struggling [...]

Tagged as in Branding, The Flourish Identity

The Griffin Glasshouses rebrand and website went live last week and I’m so pleased to share it with you on the blog. Thanks to a fabulous copywriter and marketer (Louisa Winter of My Marketing Person) who worked with us and the Griffin team to pull everything together, this website has been pretty quick to launch: [...]

Tagged as in Case Studies, From The Studio, Rebranding, Web Design

In preparation for a new brand identity that we’re creating for a customer over the next couple of weeks, I’ve been doing some research into some beautiful script fonts that make me swoon! I’ve been exploring the big world of typefaces for a stunning accent font to work for brand packaging, potentially the tagline and [...]

Tagged as in Branding, Graphic Design, Inspirations