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.

And I do understand that thinking, but it doesn’t make good business sense. Why? Because that same slow decline into Christmas is often mirrored on the other side, and it’s often February before life lets you start planning ahead. As you know, we’re working hard to dangle some carrots to get you thinking about your websites and logos this side of Christmas (and whilst we will be dangling some carrots in January, our biggest carrots will go to the lovely people who have already started thinking ahead!) and so I thought that we might celebrate some of those Forward Thinkers on the blog.

Introducing… Griffin Glasshouses

Linda Lane is Managing Director of Griffin Glasshouses and one of our first Forward Thinkers. Linda is planning ahead for a busy Spring season and has asked us to create a new website. We spent a couple of hours mapping out the website with Linda and her team – planning the customer journey, understanding how we could make the most of Griffin’s sales funnel and understanding how the site should be structured.

For the last couple of weeks Linda has been able to focus on her day job whilst we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes: developing concepts. creating wireframes and this week, creating a knockout design that I hope knocks the socks off the current design.

The Current Website

Naturally there’ll need to be a little input (when Linda and her team are ready) to review the designs and feed back to us with any changes, but the idea is that the whole process is as efficient as possible to enable the Griffin Glasshouse team to focus on what they do best while we do what we do best.

And with a small sprinkle of Flourish magic dust

This is a bit of a work in progress, but you get the idea…

The next step is to create the look and feel for the rest of the pages once we know that these initial concepts are headed in the right direction. I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact the new design, navigation and structure have on the Griffin Glasshouse enquiry levels, and most importantly, their sales. Watch this space…

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

Claire runs Green Tree Cosmetics, a company that creates high quality, natural cosmetics. Claire asked us to create a brand identity for her  with an approachable, distinctive and environmentally friendly look. She loves all of the concepts and would really appreciate your thoughts and input, so without further ado I introduce the colours…

Colour Palette

Green Tree Cosmetics is an Autumnal business with subtle Winter undertones. The colours we’ve selected highlight the professionalism, sophistication, elegance and style that are key to the success of the brand.

Colours are muted and yellow-based. Your Autumnal palette is passionate, visionary and aspirational – all the qualities that will attract both Claire’s retail and corporate markets.

Concept One

Concept one oozes quality and elegance whilst an accessible and friendly feel is maintained in the rounded shape. The logo is distinctive and has a professional and luxurious feel. The bird icon is fresh and visionary and hints at the natural and environmentally friendly products.

Concept Two

The second concept has a unique and unusual font with soft flicks which look like leaves. This stylish and distinctive logo is clean, strong and accessible.

As an extension of the leaf in the logo we have introduced a tree graphic which sits separately to the logo. This graphic enhances the overall look and feel of the brand and relates to the ethos of the business.

Concept Three

Sophisticated and stylish.

The elegant font combined with the muted colours creates a modern, clean and distinctive look.

We have shown the icon in the context of the logo and also as a separate graphic which is very adaptable across the range of products. This icon can change colour depending on the product type or flavour and has a strong, iconic presence.

Over to you

I’m finding it hard to choose (I have two very firm favourites) – and I know Claire loves them! Do share your thoughts and vote for your favourite. We really look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Hurray! Something gorgeous to look at! This is Chloe’s first draft for the eCommerce website design for Harvey Maria. What do you think?

Remember the current website?

Visually and structurally there was a lot to do.

Make it feel more aspirational, easy to use and something that reflects our brand values and engages our target audience were just some of the elements of our brief from Harvey Maria.

The new look is certainly much cleaner, more sophisticated and more engaging. I love the new logo (which incidentally Harvey Maria brought with them from another agency, we all felt it worked really well and it adds a lot to the new design). The grey allows the fabulous tiles to shine and lets the flooring really speak for itself.

And here’s the Collection page

And this is the collection page as it stands. Improved navigation, a more sophisticated colour palette for the product information and the ability to access other collections from the same page make a real difference to the end result I think.

So I love the new design. I love the elegance, the sophisticated colour palette and the engaging typography. But this is very much a work in progress so we would love your thoughts and feedback!

The Wireframes

Between every website brief and website design comes the planning and the wireframing. This is where we sketch out how the site will work, what bits need to go where and how the functional bits of the site will come together. In a simple brochure website this is often just a case of sketching out a couple of boxes, or perhaps even letting the designer take control at the design stage if it’s a very simple site.

With something more complex like the Harvey Maria ecommerce website, we needed a lot more time to get the structure right.

As I mentioned in my last post, not only was the design in need of a little TLC, we were also very keen to improve the functionality. Simple things like how visitors view and search for the floor tiles as well as wider issues like how they move around the site.

Planning, planning and more planning

Caroline, our Creative Director, Stuart, our Senior Web Developer, and I spent a long time planning how we would fit all the elements together. There was a lot of bashing our heads together around certain elements (the sampling service and the tile browsing spring to mind in particular!) and we thought long and hard about the structure, functionality, practicality, usability (is that enough ility’s?) as well as the social media elements of the site.

All the time we put in at the outset on this has really paid off. It’s meant that our clients have been able to focus solely on the functionality and structure without getting distracted by the pretty bits. And it has also meant that Chloe has been able to focus on making it look pretty, confident that the structure works.

Getting the detail right before the design

Here are the wireframes, in all their glory. It took four revisions to get this bit right, but as it was such a complex site it made a lot of sense.

Homepage

The current website is overwhelming in terms of where to click first and what to do. We wanted to make the journey as straightforward and funnelled as possible, which should make a big difference to the sites’ bounce rate and conversion rates. Still work to do at this point but the idea was that if you are looking for a particular type of flooring that you can find it from the homepage.

Things like showing the number of tiles in each section gives the visitor more power and knowledge and makes the experience on site more enjoyable.

And the final homepage layout.

Next up I’ll share with you the designs, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Harvey Maria create the most fabulous floors and we are delighted to be creating a new ecommerce website for them.

I had first come across the company when I was looking at some Cath Kidston floor tiles for our family bathroom, and so I was jumping through hoops when they approached us to help them develop their ecommerce website and make their brand more engaging. It could barely be more up our street!

Over the next couple of months I’m going to share the story around the project we’re doing for Harvey Maria, and I’d love your feedback along the way too. We’re at the stage where the wireframes for the new website have been signed off and we’re just about to proof the creative brand identity development and website design. It’s an exciting project for us because it allows us to bring together our passion for creating engaging design with our enthusiasm for ecommerce, and any brand that carries Cath Kidston is onto a winner in my eyes.

The Challenge

Harvey Maria’s current website is just not where it needs to be. The use of yellow and bright green feels very “trade”. And the exclusion of VAT, the chunky typography and the heavy use of dark grey/ black just further intensifies that.

Now that’s not to say that it should be all skippy and girly. Cath Kidston is just a proportion of what Harvey Maria do. Their tagline is fabulous floors, and the floors are truly fabulous! From the brights in the Colours Collection to the tasteful woods and stunning leather collection.

Structurally the site is busy, complicated and doesn’t guide visitors around as effectively as it might.

The brief for the new website is to make the site more engaging, more user friendly and encourage visitors to order samples. The company is on a mission to grow – significantly over the next twelve months or so. They are exploring some exciting design collaborations as well as a strong retail platform and they need a website that reflects both the quality of their product and their customer base.

Our goal is to create a design that is strong, elegant and exciting. We want to clean up the layout, encourage people to take some very specific actions and also to create a site that is socially more powerful. It’s about creating an experience, encouraging people to interact and creating a much stronger brand.

I’ll be sharing our wireframes for the site next week, and once we’ve had some feedback on the creative, I’ll also post that very soon…

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’d love to know how you get on and please do comment with links back to your own blog so that we can see your lovely work!

Here’s what we’re making.

Step One: Create some space

Open your image in Photoshop and make your canvas a couple of cm/ 150 pixels or so bigger than the image at the bottom. You do this by going to Image> Canvas Size. To avoid space all around the image change the blocks at the bottom as I have and then the extra space will sit on the bottom only.

Step Two: Create your blocks

Remember drawing a rectangular block from our last tutorial? Well we’re going to do the same again. Depending on your preference you can make these blocks any shape or size. I’m going to go for landscape blocks.

I’ve also switched on the grid (by going to View> Show> Guides). When I’m designing normally I find these guides annoying, but for something like the blocks it really helps me be precise.

Create a new layer and draw yourself a rectangular marquee. Fill the block with your foreground colour. It doesn’t really matter at this stage what the colour is as we’ll do the precise colour picking later.

Step Three: Duplicate your colour blocks

So that we don’t need to mess about getting the blocks precisely the same size we’re going to duplicate them a few times. Ready? Here goes.

Create a duplicate layer by dragging your layer with the block on it (I’ve named mine block 1) over the Create a New Layer tool. This will duplicate your layer so that you have two blocks on top of eachother. Take the new block and move it to the right, a neat distance (I choose one square away) from the first block.

Select both layers and Merge together (I use “Apple E” command). The next job is to duplicate that layer twice so that you end up with six blocks.

It’s not looking inspiring yet but it is looking neat!

Step Four: Add some colour

The next bit involves a bit of creative license. My image is an Autumnal Colour Psychology mood board that we’ve created to illustrate our new website. I want the colours to represent the warmth and vibrancy of the Autumn colour personality so I need to be sure that the colours I end up with are warm, intense and muted. When you colour pick from a photograph, you often end up with quite distorted colours because the shadows add a lot of grey into the colour tones, so you may need a few stabs to get exactly what you’re looking for.

Use the Eyedropper tool to pick colours from your image. On my tools palette – left hand side of my screen it’s 6th down and looks like a pipette (remember those from science?!).

Once you have a colour you’re happy with use the paint bucket tool to drop your colour onto one of your blocks. For this to work remember you’ll need to select the right layer. If you flood the entire screen with colour you’re on the wrong layer! Now that I’ve done my pixel work you’ll notice I’ve turned off my grid so I can see what I’m doing.

How’s that? Delicious I think!

Step Five: Finishing off

It’s looking gorgeous, but I just need to do a couple more things before I use my image on the blog.

That chunk of white at the bottom is annoying me so I need to use the crop tool to cut it down to size. On second glance that teal on the left hand side is feeling slightly disharmonious for the Autumn palette. It’s a bit cool, so I’m going to adjust the colour and warm it up a bit. I wouldn’t expect you to do this, but for a colour psychology freak like me it’s a bit of a must…

Finally I need to save my image for web and try and keep the file size down to about 70-80kb so that it doesn’t take an age to load. This doesn’t always work, but on a file of these dimensions it should be fine.

Over to you

I’d love to know how you get on with these tutorials. If you find them useful, then I’ll keep going Do let me know, and please do post links to your handiwork!

Next up I’m going to show you how to add colour blocks to your own images, but in the meantime here’s a bit of inspiration from Jennie – if you haven’t read her blog, do. It’s beautiful.

I love how Jennie has created a harmonious colour palette from images she herself has taken inspiration from. Doing the same sort of thing on your blog is quite straightforward when you know how. And that’s what we’ll look at next.

I know the colour blocks concept isn’t a new one, but Jennie does it just so inspiringly! Are there any other blogs that you feel do this well? I’m like a magpie with this sort of thing so I’d love you to share your favourites.

Color Dose concept boards: Odessa May Society

Note: I’m going to get a little bit techy here about colour psychology. Regular blog readers will be familiar with me talking about seasonal colour psychology personalities and the effect they have on the business. If you’re new to the concept of colour psychology you may like to read my Colour Psychology Absolute Essentials posts first.

I’m often asked by clients whether their own personality has any bearing on the colour psychology of their business. My stock, and immediate answer is no, it shouldn’t do. Colour psychology is about using colour (and texture, shape, type) to support the key brand messages of your business. We’re very analytical about identifying those core attributes and they are what drive our decisions about colour. But it’s not quite as simple as that.

Your personality will probably influence your business

In my experience, the vast majority of entrepreneurs shape their businesses in line with their own values. You may do this consciously or subconsciously, but experience tells me you’ll do it.

This often means that both business and business owner will share certain characteristics and attributes. And I think this is more prevalent, though not exclusively so, in small businesses.

Small businesses don’t always feel comfortable about showing their true “personalities” through their brand. And I think that’s a shame. By being aware of your core brand values and creating a brand identity that supports that, you’ll gain more profitable, loyal clients and differentiate your business from your competitors. It’s certainly a benefit we see time and again with our branding clients at Flourish.

But I digress. Let’s think big for a moment. Do you suppose Richard Branson eradicated his personality when setting up Virgin? Of course not! It’s his very drive, values and ambition that many of his customers find so utterly compelling. And that message is very aptly supported by the Winter colour palette: exciting, vibrant reds, luxurious and strong black.

So to scale back to small businesses. If small business owners are prepared to embrace the effect their own personality has on their business brand, then the chances are that your business colour psychology personality will be very similar to your own personality.

Your business colour psychology won’t be in line with your personal colour psychology because we want to please you, but most likely because my experience tells me it’s nigh on impossible to completely eradicate the influence of the business owner on their company, and that leaves a lasting, and positive, impression.

What do you think? Do you accentuate or dampen down your personality within your business?