Unveiling the brand new face for Creating Media!
9/3/2013
Author: Creating Media Team
Today is a very exciting day for us here in the Creating Media office, as we are officially launching our brand new website and visual brand!
We regularly carry out the ‘brand refresh’ treatment for our clients, but it has been long overdue on our own business! The Mini, a huge part of the old brand, had become tired and tatty, so we had removed the distinctive vinyl covering. Our website had grown and grown with time, until it was a bit of a confusing beast to navigate. In general we were badly in need of a dose of our own medicine!
We finally bit the bullet and started brainstorming on how best to move the brand forward with our constantly evolving business. We knew we would need to refresh the logo before we could begin completely overhauling the design for the mini and website, and then move on to those everyday items like business cards, stationery and banners. The further you dig with branding, the more that seems to pop up – what about the images on our social media channels? It seems never-ending – but it needs to be done!
To start with the logo we wanted to keep the general feel of the current logo, but update the font. We decided to use the same font as the Umami logo, tying our sister brands together subtly. We also started redesigning the 3-part wheel that sits next to our company name, but abandoned this as the font-based logo looked so good on its own. We chose the colours based on the colour of the company Mini – which has secretly been burgundy underneath the white-and-green wrap this whole time! Blue is a great complement to burgundy (as a design house we love our colour wheel!) so we chose this as the other main colour for the brand, supported by some nice clean white and pale grey.
We then moved on to designing the Mini – in the old branding the Mini was incorporated into everything so we knew we needed to do this next. Using our palette of blues, grey and white we came up with a very classically ‘Mini’ design – go-faster stripes and chevrons to sit alongside a big ol’ list of our services so that anyone who sees us knows what we do!
We knew we wanted the website to be responsive, and again to keep some aspects of the current site. We kept the ‘box’ layout for the homepage, with snippets of each of the internal pages. We always kept in mind what potential customers coming to our website would want to know, and we’re hoping our copywriting and layout supports this. We have not one, but two sliders to display our work and services right at the top of the homepage, before including a contact form, blog feed and links through to the internal pages in an attractive layout.
By this time we knew our new design style so well that things like business cards, letterheads and marketing postcards were done in next to no time, and all in keeping with our fresh new brand feel. The car was booked in to the sign writers, the print was ordered, and final tweaks were made to the website with the final launch date in mind for 1st September (well, the 2nd September as the first was a Sunday…)
We also have brand new banners and promotional goodies in the pipeline ready for our stand at Usk Show on the 14th September – this will be like our official launch party, as the first official outing with the new brand. Why not come and join us for a drink at Usk? You’ll find us ringside, with the brand new Mini parked outside!
We’re so excited about the new branding, it has really reinvigorated our enthusiasm for the business. We now have an excuse to contact old clients we may have lost touch with, write lots of blog posts, get in touch with the local press, and just generally shout about ourselves. The new Mini is already attracting attention and creating new awareness for the brand, and the new website will hopefully wow anyone who visits it (we personally love it!) The new logo shows we are looking forward, with a more modern font, and we have altered our brand language to be more friendly, chatty and approachable, as many clients we spoke to revealed they chose us due to our approachable presence at local networking and business events.
With the continuing buzz for Umami, and the upcoming Monmouthshire Business Awards that we are finalists for, it really is an exciting time to launch this new branding. We hope you love it as much as we do!
