by Fiona Humberstone on September 2, 2010 · 0 comments

Regular blog readers will have been on Sara’s journey from a germ of an idea back in the Spring to a fully fledged business complete with website five months later. You might remember me asking for your help in helping Sara choose a logo (she loved them all and couldn’t decide), we then updated you with the finished logo and stationery before I had the enviable task of having to plan out her site. Naturally I needed to undertake plenty of research whilst planning the site (and probably gained a few pounds in the process…).
Sara offers handmade chocolates for corporate events and weddings as well as (sign me up!) making and tasting parties. The goal was at this stage to provide an information resource, Sara has a young family and didn’t want a shop on the site (at the moment) so we just needed to make it look gorgeous and provide enough information for Sara’s customers to get in touch.

Sara wrote her own copy with a few pointers from me and I love the fact that she’s so effectively communicated her passion for her business and her chocolates.
I love the way Chloe has used imagery to guide people around the site – it makes things so much more interactive. And the photography works really well.

What do you think?
in Branding, Case Studies, Graphic Design, In The Studio This Week, Online Marketing, Web Design, Websites
by Fiona Humberstone on August 26, 2010 · 4 comments

Ooooooh I can hardly contain myself. For weeks I’ve been desperate to show you photographer Matt Tyler’s delicious new website and finally here it is! Good to go.
So what do you think? Scrumptious is a word I’d like to use to describe it myself… But being a democracy I’d like to hear your thoughts too…
Matt approached us a few months back. He’d seen a lot of the work we’d done for other photographers (we do seem to attract them, in the nicest possible way…) and he wondered whether we could help him redesign his website. His original site was far from dreadful so the pressure was on to come up with something super-amazing. Matt had quite a clear brief for us: he liked the dark background, he’d just had a new logo created by a friend (which is lovely) and wanted to incorporate that and he wanted a lot more functionality.
Matt’s original site didn’t flow as well as it might. Simple things like it lacked a contact page and the gallery was hosted externally so if you clicked on that you lost the navigation. The dark design also felt quite heavy. So cue the fabulous Rob to create something that looked more engaging, showed off the photos to their best ability and still felt male.

Stuart, our resident clever clogs (aka Web Developer) has somehow with some very clever hocus pocus managed to make that gorgeous handwriting font display dynamically. Don’t ask me how because I have no idea. I’m just very impressed with him
. One of the true joys of working with a photographer is that they make your life very easy because they always supply you with great photos, and this picture of Matt is fab I think – he looks super-cool!

Rob has also added the stitching round the logo which I think works really well with the romantic and understated font (remember that list of handwriting fonts Caroline showed you last week? One of the clients she was searching for was Matt) and also softens what could be a very dark site if you weren’t careful.

So judging by the initial comments on twitter I know that Matt and his followers are chuffed to bits, but how about you? What do you think?
in Case Studies, Graphic Design, In The Studio This Week, Online Marketing, Web Design, Websites