The Flourish Identity

You probably know from my six months of hinting that creating this new website for Flourish has been far from easy. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the hardest things we’ve ever done. Creating the initial brand identity was incredibly difficult, but updating something that was right in so many aspects but not working in others has been a real journey.

I think the hardest thing is that when you’re designing your own stuff, you don’t have that objectivity and distance that comes so naturally when you’re working on a client project. Some ideas get quashed instantly and others perhaps get taken too far for a while because of that difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees.

I thought it might be fun to share the journey we’ve been on over the past six months (and more) in creating the Flourish site because I’d love to give you an insight into the process and also the didn’t runs/ also rans.

Where we started from

I know this isn’t dreadful, but the truth is that design has moved on, and whilst I really love the feel of this website, in terms of how it looks, it just wasn’t doing us justice. Over the past couple of years we’ve really grown as a creative team and this just wasn’t doing our capabilities justice. The challenge at first was that we forgot that whilst we didn’t like how this looked, it had an important feel that we needed to be careful not to lose.

Waaaay back when

August 2011 we got as far as building this website but thankfully didn’t ever set it live or finish the build. It has more of the grown up and smart feel that we wanted, but it also completely lost it’s flair and personality. Thankfully some very kind clients pointed out that it just wasn’t “us” (something that’s really hard to see when you’re in the thick of designing for yourselves).

Brand Stylists Mark One

Personally I loved the yellow and the smartness of this, but somewhere we lost the Flourishness.

Mark Two

Aaaah, that’s better! Whiter and brighter and the circles make it feel more Spring like don’t they (Flourish is the Spring side of Autumn). We loved those illustrations too but they just weren’t right!

Mark Three

New boy James had the unenviable task of taking over the website design when we realised we were hitting a brick wall, and this has many of the elements that are right: stylists hats, gorgeous patterns and beautiful imagery, but the texture and styling just make it feel too staid and not expressive enough.

Mark Four

Caroline worked on the final designs and I think has really captured the essence of Flourish. Once she had the main concepts in place it was a real team effort to create banners, illustrations, buttons and pattern and each and every one of the team has had a hand in creating something just utterly knockout.

Even from this point we took our time to make sure each element was right and sending out the right signals. I know from all the tweets and lovely emails you’ve sent us that it’s been worth the effort and I’m so excited about what the future holds for Flourish. Exciting times!

Tagged as in The Flourish Identity

Hurrah and phew! The refreshed Flourish website has been a long time coming but I am utterly delighted to now announce that it is live.

It has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get here, and quite a few late nights and pernickety creative meetings too, but I hope you’ll agree that the finished result is well and truly worth it.

The journey started back in January when teaching my Branding Masterclass students made me stop and think carefully about our own brand and how we’ve grown as a business. We worked with Bronwyn, our Brand Strategist on finding our focus and developing a strapline that perfectly sums us up, and Brand Stylists perfectly describes what we do. It’s all about creating an irresistible brand identity, logo design and then communicating that with flair, style and panache across all channels: from websites and blogs to your catalogues, brochures, blogs and direct mail pieces.

When I launched Flourish back in February 2010 we were in a very different place to where we are now. Launching Flourish felt like my business had grown up and it was exciting to be taken seriously as a design agency. We’ve really grown and developed over the last couple of years, and whilst we still have the same values I know that we’re much more confident in our abilities and we’ve certainly moulded the business into something that truly plays to our strengths.

I still love working with small businesses, and will always continue to do so. The creativity, fun and thrill of creating something gorgeous that we know will have a huge impact on the clients’ business never gets old and we don’t want to lose that. What I hope is that you’ll see that this really celebrates our distinctive and engaging design style that we’ve become known for, it’s about creating designs that help our clients stand apart from the crowd.

Creating a website that has the same approachability and quirkiness that you tell us you love about our current website whilst reflecting both how website design has moved on and how we’ve moved on hasn’t been without it’s challenges. It’s been incredibly frustrating, hard to see the wood for the trees and really demotivating at times when we’ve wondered how we manage to do this for everyone else so often but have found it so hard for ourselves!

I’m going to be inviting the team to share some of the journey to create this website – from banners that didn’t quite make it to conceptual twists and turns and everything along the way. We started to share a little of the progress back in February but ultimately it was just too painful at the time! We can now happily share it all with you warts and all. I hope you’ll find it interesting…

But don’t just take my word for it, take a trip over to the website and have a poke around for yourself!

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, From The Studio, The Flourish Identity

I am so excited I think I may actually burst. We have finally cracked the update to the Flourish brand identity and I cannot tell you what a thrill it is to be so close to launching our gorgeous new website.

It’s not fair to call this a “rebrand” because I think that implies you’re making fundamental changes to the essence of the brand focus and brand identity. And that’s not what this project has been about. It’s more about taking the Flourish identity to the next level whilst retaining all the things that make us who we are.

So the energy, colour and quirkiness stays, but elements of the design have moved on, and our focus is now on styling brands and all the communication that goes with that – from the websites and blogs to the printed brochures, postcards and other pieces of direct mail. We create irresistible brand identities and help our clients communicate with flair and passion, simple as that!

So the design emphasis is less on growth and all the associated images that come with that – from the leaves and flowers to our lovely packets of seeds (sob!). That’s definitely still a lovely side effect of what we do for our clients but we hope that the emphasis on brand stylists gives us a very unique space in the market and one that truly plays to our strengths.

I can’t pretend that the journey to get here hasn’t been tough. I think I speak for us all when I say it’s been incredibly tough to gain the clarity, objectivity and inspiration we rely on for all of our design work. It’s always difficult doing your own stuff, and I thought this time might be easier than when we first launched Flourish in 2010, but I can honestly say it hasn’t been. It’s been really hard work.

We’ve definitely broken the back of things now. We have our slightly modified colour palette, we have a lovely new range of fonts and we have some utterly gorgeous icons. We’ve developed some new patterns and we’re working on a few more. We’ve printed up some beautiful gift packs for our current and prospective clients as well as a whole lot of printed literature.

The last few pieces of the puzzle are the website and eventually the blog too.

Caroline’s putting the finishing touches to the website design and that’s going to be built over the next couple of weeks. Once it’s live I’ll be giving you an insight into a journey that’s been littered with false starts, wrong turns and dead ends, but that I’m now confident is very Flourish.

I don’t want to show you too much until everything is in place, but I did think you might like a little sneak preview of some of our bespoke Flourish notebooks, illustrated by our fabulous James… Would love to know what you think!

Tagged as in The Flourish Identity

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Tagged as in Branding, The Flourish Identity

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Tagged as in The Flourish Identity

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Tagged as in Branding, Case Studies, Flourish Stuff, From The Studio, The Flourish Identity, Workshops

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Tagged as in Branding, Colour Psychology, Flourish Stuff, Graphic Design, Logo Design, The Flourish Identity

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Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, The Flourish Identity