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?

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?

Lisa is a fabulous Garden Designer based in Leatherhead, Surrey, but whose flair for creating gardens that suit their owners has meant that she works both throughout the UK and internationally. Lisa has been blogging now for several years, and you may remember our initial blog design? This latest iteration reflects where Lisa’s business is right now and works with her blogging style just perfectly!

Chloe has made sure that Lisa’s new blog fits within Lisa’s brand style and website design, whilst at the same time giving another dimension to her brand. I think it’s really boring when your blog looks the same as your website: it’s supposed to have another voice, another take on your business. So we’ve used the distinctive handwriting font and the same colour palette but introduced some new texture, pattern and illustrations.

Redesigning the Flourish blog is one of the next jobs on our list, and so I’m incredibly jealous of the small details on Lisa’s blog: the customisation of things like the Link Within box and the way the comments box has been styled. Just gorgeous!

Lisa takes beautiful photos of both her own garden designs and also gardens that inspire her, and I really think the new blog design shows them off in their full glory. I saw lots of lovely comments on Twitter yesterday about Lisa’s blog and I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact it has on her business.

Oh and isn’t the name fab? Lisa and I brainstormed a lot, as I know did many of her friends! I forget who came up with the name, but I think it perfectly encapsulates what Lisa creates for her clients: a room outside they want to spend time in. And I think the strapline “Grand Plans for Outdoor Spaces” just builds on that nicely.

You can see Lisa’s new blog, The Room Outside, at blog.lisacoxdesigns.co.uk I’d love to know what you think…

Remember the mood board from this morning for interiors and giftware company, Pablo Blue? Well I am delighted to say that we have just presented them with their brand identity concepts and they love them! They (and we) have a favourite and Chloe is currently making some tweaks over the next week before we send them round 2.

I’m not sure whether or not to tell you which the favourite was – would love your thoughts too!

Concept One

Strong, iconic and with a gorgeous artisan feel this concept really lets the product sing.

Concept Two

Such beautiful colours together! OK so there’s quite a different twist from the mood board but that’s often how things work. The mood board is our inspiration, our jumping off point. We often land up in some quite creative tangents, and I think that’s half the fun!

Concept Three

Perhaps the safest option of the three, I think the execution still keeps this classy and I have a really strong emotional reaction to those flowers, I love them. Whether it’s right for Pablo Blue though is another question but we do always like to show a safer option as well as some that are more out there.

Over to you

What do you think? Which do you respond to the most? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Ta da! The brand, spanking new website for the Branding Masterclass is now live, and with the next class less than four weeks away, I wanted to share the design with you.

I’m not one to hang about (as my team will testify) and so when I made the decision to launch our first masterclass back in late November 2011 I knew we had our work cut out preparing the “classroom” (aka the blog), the brand, a promo video, writing the content and the sales copy as well as all the back end admin it takes to run a course. We did a LOT in that two-ish months and fitting in a stand alone website was always going to be impossible. But I did want to pull one together for the next class.

Both James and Stuart have worked incredibly hard to pull this together before Easter, and I want to say a very big and public thank you to both of them (and Caroline) for making sure the site was ready. I know it wasn’t easy, especially with your current workload, but it is very much appreciated.

The Designs

The designs are very much rooted in the brand identity James created back in January for my masterclass classroom. I wanted everything to feel clean, easy to read and welcoming but also with some substance. This isn’t airy fairy stuff, despite the prolific use of flowery pictures! There’s real, commercial meat behind what I’m writing about, even if much of it is delivered in a light and easy to understand way. And so I love James’ use of type, colour and white space.

There’s a bit of work to be done after the Easter hols on the about page – I wanted to put a quick showreel together of our work for anyone that hadn’t come via our website or blog, so we’ll add that in over time. We also plan to integrate our event booking system into the website and be done with the horrible shopping cart once and for all! But I think that realistically that’s going to need to wait until after May…

We wanted to bring the testimonials to life and as they’re such a photogenic bunch, the social media avatars work quite well don’t you think?

You can see the website in action over at brandingmasterclass.com

Something very serene and lovely to share with you today: three initial design concepts for top florist, Jane Wadham.

Jane has a very well established business supplying flowers to prestigious London venues such as The British Museum, The Natural History Museum and Kensington Palace no less! JW Flowers has a great reputation and is poised to grow further: but they needed our help to create a new look that really helps attract and engage the consumer market.

JW Flowers currently have a a mail order flowers business supplying elegant and beautiful arrangements nationwide. But without making anyone feel too uncomfortable, it’s clear that the current website needs to change. The design, layout and branding simply aren’t doing the beauty of the flowers justice. Jane’s business is currently branded JW Flowers, but after more than two decades of success, it was time to celebrate Jane’s talent and make the name more centric (and consumer focused) to Jane Wadham Flowers.

Our brief was to create something more elegant, aspirational and beautiful. Which do you love the most?

Concept One

Soft, romantic and serene, this concept certainly builds on the grace and elegance of many of Jane Wadham Flowers arrangements. The logo is simple and graceful whilst the icon can be used for stickers, packaging, on tissue paper or as a punctuation mark on the website.

Concept Two

A much stronger, more directional design to play up to the high end nature of this florist’s business. There’s no shortage of mid-market florists, but Jane Wadham Flowers are doing something much more creative and upmarket and I think this concept really plays up to this well.

Concept Three

This concept takes it’s inspiration from floral shapes and has a more approachable feel about it.

I’d love your thoughts. Which of these brand identities do you like the most?

We launched three beautiful websites for talented photographer Kate Lloyd back in January, and we’ve been so busy with the masterclass and projects in the studio that it’s not until now that I’ve had five minutes to sit down and share them with you. Kate Lloyd is a grandmother, doctor and in the past five years, has turned her passion for photography into a professional business.

Kate’s first website was certainly smart, but it simply wasn’t generating the level of business that we knew Kate deserved. It was black and lime green, very funky and in some ways, right for Kate. But with all due respect, it was the sort of website that would suit a 30 year old (probably man). It wasn’t communicating all of the best bits about working with Kate: her compassion, her warmth, her experience and her grandmotherly skills that ensure that my spirited (then) two year old complied with the photoshoot.

We loved the logo, so we wanted to create a series of websites that felt more approachable and showed off Kate’s photography in the best light, whilst keeping a similar structure between the sites: both for ease of navigation and because it meant that we could enjoy some economies of scale in the build without reinventing the wheel.

Isn’t Kate’s newborn photography just adorable? This is a new departure for Kate, and something that she wasn’t promoting when we first started working on her website, but it’s wonderful that as Kate’s business changes, so her website can grow with her.

The Website Design

Inspired by AA Milne’s Now We Are Six poem, Kate wrote a poem that brought tears to our eyes to work alongside the slider on the homepage. You’ll need to look at the site to get the full effect but isn’t it just lovely? The idea was to make it feel much more storybook, traditional and embrace the grandmother rather than underplay it: I think it’s a fabulous selling point.

Advice pages really help connect with the reader as well as provide that all important information!

And what a lovely photograph of Kate! She looks relaxed and approachable doesn’t she? We also had some wonderful shots of Kate photographing my children, not so much to get my kids, but more so that we could have some action shots!

Initial feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact this is going to have on Kate’s business.