Case Study: Portena
Just after Shoot the Designer's first birthday, we were approached by Connie Kennedy, a lovely woman who had just started her own leisurewear label, Porteña. When she came to us, she had an illustration that she had aquired to represent her brand, as well as a logo and particular branding direction.
Roughly half of the clients that approach us are either entirely established companies or businesses that already have their branding schemes completed. Having a client with an already established brand requires a different skill set to producing a product from scratch. It requires a different kind of creativity to work within set limitations, possibilities than to have a clean slate. Regardless of their differences, both are fun, challenging and rewarding.
This is the foundation that Connie provided us with: a piece of clip art and a font that comes standard with Windows for a logotype. This particular selection (which is fairly unconventional within design circles) presents an interesting challenge in marrying these visual features with a coherant and aesthetically pleasing web design.
The Feature Selection Process
A large part of Connie's marketing strategy was not just to point real life customers at a website to order further goods, but to engage with existing and new customers on a personal level through her site through the use of a blog and Twitter account. She made it clear that she wanted a clean, sophisticated site that encapsulated the carefree, happy and sunny nature of her label and products.
Features wise, she needed a blog, cms for the main part of her site, clear links to her social networking tools, and an easy to use image gallery for her products.
Using this information, we set out to turn this list of desires into a comprehensive web solution to help Connie make the most of her business.
What We Came Up With
This is the design we came up with.
Photo Manipulation
Another service that Shoot the Designer offers that Connie took us up on was the retouching of some of the images she was using to advertise her products. Many of her images did not showcase her wares as well as they could, with a noisy image quality and irregular colouration and lighting that distracted from the objective of these images.
Our photo manipulation is not about making the models shown more traditionally beautiful, but enhancing the images to remove potential distractions.
Case Study: The Every Gamer’s Guild
At the end of 2008, Shoot the Designer had the pleasure of working with the Every Gamer's Guild, a gaming community group that meets monthly to play board games, card games, tabletop games and wargames. We were enlisted to assist the group with their brandnhg, website, mailing list and overall image and online approach.
The Every Gamer's Guild is casual, family friendly, and community focussed. We wanted to portray these qualities with a wholistic, consistant image that's appealing to both the visitors and professional entities that may interact with the group and its members.
Step One: Mind Map & Research
After pages of very boring notes, we produced elements that needed to be placed within the image of the group, and assigned a number of colours that signify what the group is about and what it stands for.
So, between what you see there, and a rather large mindmap that we'll save for another day, we now have an idea of what general direction we were going in.
Step Two: Preliminary Sketches & Designs
As a part of this process, we spent a lot of time drawing eggs of various shapes and sizes, but soon realised it wasn't enough for a group like this to have a minimal icon that didn't reference their heart. Here's the first of several sketches we produced that later turned into the final product.
Now, a few things are worth pointing out here. The overall design is that of a coat of arms in structure, with the egg serving as the helm of the design. We used a coat of arms structure as a throwback to the European themes that show up in many of the games that are played in the group, as well as a signal of solidarity within the group.
In the context of a coat of arms, the use of blue traditionally signifies truth and loyalty, two virtues that consistantly appear throughout the oversight and creed of the group. Golden colours represent generosity and elevation of the mind. (source) The vines are a historical symbol of friendship and peace, and while weapons often appear throughout historical coats of arms, the group has taken up its own weapons to settle disputes, that of a dice (a 20 sided one in this case, as a throwback to the roleplayers in the group) and a meeple, one of the most well known player-markers in European board gaming.
Step Three: Cleaning & Polishing
Onc
e a general direction is chosen, there is more to implementation than just tracing your sketch in Illustrator and whacking it online. Care must be taken to ensure that the mark can be used in a wide variety of situations, sizes and conditions. Where the mark stands alone, we have added a banner at the bottom containing the name of the group, and we have ensured that it still retains visual impact in greyscale and at small sizes.
Step Four: Finalisation & Implementation
Taking the stylistic choices of the logo into account, the design was matched with a complimenting web design, and templates for print media needed in the future.
Take a look at our web design and forum at http://everygamersguild.com
