The Flourish Identity

Would you like a sneak preview of the Branding Masterclass branding? Oh go on then…

With less than two weeks to go until the launch of the fabulous online Branding Masterclass the team in the studio are working incredibly hard dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the brand identity and blogsite. You can see the brand elements below.

You’re going to see a bit of a nip tuck to the Flourish brand identity over the next couple of months as we prepare for a very exciting extension and refocus on our own brand. I’ll be sharing more about the story behind that soon, but in the meantime, this gives you a flavour for where we’re headed. The Branding Masterclass needs to reflect and work with our brand, but it’s also a brand in it’s own right, with it’s own attributes and characteristics, so we needed to keep it all similar but not the same.

The colour palette focuses on creativity, communication, logic and clarity. The graph paper gives a nod to work (yes, it will be a lot of fun, but I will be working them hard too!) and the icons give direction around the site.

The class will be held online via a password protected blogsite, so we needed to create a clean and easy to navigate design that  inspired the participants to focus, reflect and take action. Here are a couple of screengrabs:

The login page

We wanted to keep this simple – it’s about getting people to do what you want – login or register for details of the next class. For the people that aren’t registered, obviously this is all they’ll see…

And the class pages themselves

I was in two minds about whether to show you this, but it just looks so beautiful that I couldn’t resist! I am desperate to overhaul the Full Bloom blog design now (yes, I know again but there is so much I’d like to change…). There are still a couple of changes to make but what I hope you can see is how light, airy and neat everything feels. The perfect setting to the inspirational and powerful nature of the content

Registration for the masterclass will close at midnight on Sunday 5th February so if you’d like to get involved, then don’t forget to book – go on, do it now, while you remember… Full details on the website.

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

Earlier I explained some of our thoughts behind the final design for the full bloom blog. And I thought it might be fun for you to see the journey we took. It’s worth bearing in mind that some of the early designs would never have made it to an external client – we’d have intercepted before that! But since I have a few mockups, I thought you might like to see them.

There were lots of bits to like about the first concept but ultimately we felt it was too monotone, too cool in colouring and that the yellow banner at the top was just too deep.

V2 was much better. We preferred the colours, the header banner was less deep and we’d added in a “Flourish presents” bit at the top to overcome the challenge of how we communicate that a design agency is behind the blog without plastering it everywhere!

We still felt that the strapline could use some work, and I was unconvinced about the colour. The social media bugs were also taking up a lot of unnecessary space so for V3 we wanted to tighten things up. The menu also still needs working on as it’s not right (but that’s easily sorted in WordPress).

And the final design. As I say, still some details to be finalised on WP – such as what goes in the menu at the top {services by flourish needs to go… replaced by categories} but in the main it’s looking gorgeous and ready to be built!

Tagged as , blogging my way, blogging your way in Flourish Stuff, The Flourish Identity

Do you remember a long time ago I asked for your help in naming our blog? Well after much deliberation and cogitation we settled on the name Full Bloom. We love the connotations of Full Bloom following on from Flourish – the concept of this being the place where businesses are thriving!

So why change the name from the Flourishing blog? Well mostly because we need to think big. We often receive lovely feedback from people who read the blog who see this as a place for creative inspiration and brand and marketing advice. And it really got me thinking. Why shouldn’t this be the place that people nationally, maybe internationally, turn to for inspiration for their small business?

But if that’s what we want, then we’re going to need to think much bigger. And we all agreed that we need to remove the direct link to Flourish from the name. Hence, Full Bloom.

Above you’ll see the final design. We went through quite a number of iterations to get to this point (and see my next post for the journey…). Either way it’s quite a change from our current design (below).

Back to the new blog design…

I love the creative orange-bordering-on-red (reflective of the passion, creativity and ambition) we wanted to inject. Orangey yellow for abundance, positivity and optimisim. We’ve tried to scale back the multi-colours from the current blog to give our designs a bit more space to breathe – but at the same time we didn’t want to go all grey and lose the life from the blog.

You know I love Californian design, and I think this feels just a little bit Stateside, do you? What with the serif font and the lovely kerning (space between the letters).

Eagle eyed visitors will also notice a couple of other changes. Firstly I want to put photos of the blogger next to the post (as long as it’s not me writing – you don’t need to see my face every time I post!) – so Stu will be setting the theme to automatically add the user’s photo as long as it’s not me. Secondly we’ve added in a second column for advertisers. Our readership is steadily growing and we are getting to the point where I would like to start thinking about introducing ads for businesses complimentary to Flourish and useful to the ambitious small business owners that read this blog. More details to come when we launch but do get in touch if you’d like to know more in the meantime…

We plan to get the blog live over the next week or so and I would love to hear your thoughts to the new design. And if you give me a few hours, I’ll share the journey with you too.

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, The Flourish Identity

Last week we sent twenty or so of our most loyal customers a small valentines gift to thank them for their loyalty. I handmade some very lovely bathmelts which we celophane wrapped, tied with a green velvet ribbon and enclosed a small note. In true valentines tradition we deliberately left off the Flourish name and [...]

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

2010 was the year I firmly put my money where my mouth was. For reasons too numerous to mention I’d been running a design and marketing agency for several years before I actually branded ourselves as a design and marketing agency this February. And 2010 has been quite a year for us: in more ways [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, The Flourish Identity

When was the last time you critically looked at your website? Have you analysed how effectively it’s working for you recently and looked at the tweaks you could make to get it performing even harder for you? The Flourish website has been live for a little under six months now and we’ve reviewed and tweaked [...]

Tagged as , web design guildford in Case Studies, Flourish Stuff, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Online Marketing, The Flourish Identity, Web Design, Websites

You may have noticed that we’re just a little bit excited about our video that we’re having produced at the moment. Alex, the Director, sent me through the first edit last week and I was utterly blown away. They have done a fantastic job of creating a great story about Flourish. The team watched in [...]

Tagged as in Case Studies, Flourish Stuff, From The Studio, Marketing, Online Marketing, The Flourish Identity

A couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and commissioned a fantastic company to produce a short video for our website. Video is being used more and more on websites now: it literally enables you to bring your company to life and get people engaging with you before they meet you. I hope that [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, Online Marketing, The Flourish Identity

Just thought I’d give you a bit of a rundown of the Flourish stand from yesterday’s Grow Your Business. We put a lot of time and effort into creating a stand with instant wow factor and that, importantly, would evoke an emotive reaction. I think that this sense of emotion is something that we put [...]

Tagged as in Case Studies, Exhibitions, Flourish Stuff, The Flourish Identity

Psst! Look! It’s up! And I did nothing more than fling a few seeds in the ground. After three weeks of neglect following our holiday I’m delighted to see that with a spot of water the Flourish rainbow chard is up and looking good! Already you can see the difference in colour between the deep [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, The Flourish Identity