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.