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 into all of our designs, and so it was important that this came across on the stand.

As you can see, we didn’t hold back when it came to the styling! Plenty of English garden flowers, potted plants and gardenalia helped create a mood that was an antidote to the grey stands and grey suits that typify most business to business exhibitions. I was well aware that in creating this stand, we were probably going to divide people. And that was fine by me. We had plenty of people coming up to us saying that they loved the stand, and I’m sure there were plenty of people there thinking “What on earth are they doing? This isn’t Chelsea Flower Show…”. But I would rather be memorable and evoke a reaction than be bland.

The orange geums are the perfect Flourish orange and look great against the paisley green stand. The crate came from a previous trip to Kempton Antiques market and I bought the wellies especially for the show.

We handed out Swiss Chard seeds on the day (more than 150 packets that I hand stuffed and hand-finished!), spreading a little Flourish love. The idea behind the Chard was the obvious growth metaphor (that’s what we help companies do) and also the fact that they’re beautiful and productive. And I think that sums up what we try to do at Flourish. We’re about making things look gorgeous of course, but they have to add to your bottom line too.

The desk was off to the right of the stand and covered in more Flourishness. The rabbit appeared on my original Flourish mood board and I think it’s artisan, handmade qualities as well as it’s bright colours perfectly fit in with the Flourish setting. The books are from the studio, original Penguin classics of course, and were a bit of a talking point on the day. The gilt frame was repurposed from the launch party and filled with a new poster and the desk is my own from home.

We all had a phenomenal day, meeting some great people, chatting to some lovely clients and forging new relationships. It was also great to catch up with business people and other exhibitors, some of which we hadn’t seen for a year or two. We’ll be announcing the winner of our competitions very soon so keep your eyes peeled for that. In the meantime… thank you so much for visiting the show, I hope you found it useful. And do let me know what you think of the stand!

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 red and brighter yellow seedlings (I think the rest might be weed seedlings but we live in hope).

In the meantime I’d love to hear how yours are getting on. Elizabeth Cairns tells me that hers has made it into a pot on her balcony. How about you? And if you don’t have any seeds yet, then fret not. Flourish will be giving away 250 packets of the beautiful rainbow chard Bright Lights at the Grow Your Business exhibition on 12th May.

And if you missed the details of why on earth a marketing and design company would be handing out seeds… well check out this post which (hopefully) explains all!

If you’ve met Flourish at an exhibition recently or you attended our launch party then you’ll most likely have a packet of chard seeds. Why? Well more on that later… The point is that it’s time to plant them. I threw mine in last weekend in a rare moment of sunshine and I’m waiting expectantly to see some shoots. I feel a “chard-watch” post coming on soon.

If you haven’t sown them then it’s pretty easy. Rake your ground, clear it of any weeds and I scrape back a bit of soil a couple of cm deep and a few inches wide. Can you tell I’m not a gardener? If it’s proper gardening advice you want I highly recommend you take a skip and a jump over to my good friend Claire’s site: she will tell you how to do it the right way. Plant Passion’s Blog Me? I go for the “scrape back the soil, chuck ‘em in and hope for the best” approach.

So why on earth did a design & marketing company give away seeds?

We’ve given away more than 400 packets of rainbow chard, Bright Lights at various exhibitions and our launch party over the last couple of months. Giving away seeds has become a bit of a “thing” for us. It fits with our name, flourish, and it’s a nice metaphor for how we grow people’s businesses. The thing that I particularly like about rainbow chard is that it’s both beautiful and productive. And we make things look beautiful, but we’re also very commercial, we make sure it’ll get you a result. So there you have it!

If you’d like a packet of chard seeds then visit us at the Grow Your Business event in Guildford on 12th May where we’ll be giving away plenty more for free!

A huge thank you to the 80+ guests who braved torrential rain to support Flourish at our launch party at Loseley Park last night. After months of planning, designing, cutting, sticking, glueing and sourcing, I can’t believe that it’s all over!

We had a fantastic evening, including surprise entertainment from the Undercover Superstars (more on that later…), gorgeous Magenta cupcakes and plenty of blinis and bellinis to make the evening go with a swing!

Clients, my family and some of our biggest supporters were at the party which we held to celebrate the launch of our design and marketing company, Flourish, which we’re running alongside printing.com in Guildford. Flourish will build on the design, branding and marketing work that we’ve always done as a printing.com franchise; but the new name and brand identity allows us to communicate so much more powerfully the true message of what we do.

After just three weeks I can’t believe how many doors it’s opened for us (I feel a proper blog post on that subject coming very soon…).

Back to the party… Wow! Don’t you look lovely!

You may have noticed that we use a gilt frame illustration in our branding, and we thought it might be fun to invite guests to have their photos taken in the frame. They then hung them on a velvet “washing line” along with a message on one of our Flourish postcards. It was a fun icebreaker and has meant that we have a permanent installation for our meeting room now.

The flowers in my kitchen… and below, Rona turning them into something spectacular…

Rona, my multitalented PA created the most stunning flower arrangements. I had trekked up to Covent Garden Flower market on the Tuesday to buy flowers that were “on brand” and she put together the most perfectly vibrant, relaxed and generally gorgeous bouquets (including one for my mum and one for Caroline in my emotional speech!).

The entertainment

I never get nervous about public speaking, but there was something about a room full of my most inspirational clients, colleagues and family that meant that the pressure was on!

Suffice to say that there were plenty of tears and voice cracking moments as I talked about Chloe’s Count the Kicks Campaign (the Flourish Foundation charity of the month), and the support I’ve received from my mum and dad, Caroline and the team, and my lovely husband.

After that I was rudely upstaged by “Geoff Baintree”, success coach who insisted on singing me his rendition of Simply The Best and telling the audience about his business. Embarrassingly he’d been pushing his (free and badly designed) business cards on the guests all evening. A waitress had to ask him to leave, and the Chef got up to apologise… And to show us all how it was done. He burst into a rendition of “I feel good” – little did the guests know that all three were the Undercover Superstars! They gave a fantastic performance, and anyone who was under the mistaken impression that the night was a “networking event” soon got into the party spirit once the Undercover Superstars had performed!

Video courtesy of Karen Skidmore’s iPhone! Thanks Karen

The whole room was jigging, and Sarah from Open Door even managed to get up for a dance with Geoff!

The going home presents

Guests were handed goody bags packed with a signed copy of my book, rainbow chard seeds (because they’re beautiful and productive), Chocolate Alchemist organic chocolate and one of our fabulous Flourish folders.

I had also planned to make 80 cupcakes myself, as I like to think of myself as a bit of a domestic goddess, but thankfully I realised that this was one job too many. And thankfully the fabulous Tracy from Magenta Cakes stepped in to bake and ice the cupcakes which went down a storm. Keep an eye out for her newly branded website very soon…

Thank you so, so much for all your good wishes, encouraging words and general support. It really means a lot, and it was lovely to see so many of the inspirational people that have supported us on our journey there last night. There are far too many to mention, hopefully you know who you are.

I’m mood-board tastic at the moment! It all started when Bernay Laity asked us to each prepare mood boards for our Colour Psychology accreditation. We all had a lot of fun cutting, sticking and mounting textures and images that represented our personalities. And as we presented our “selves” to eachother we learned a lot.

Mood boards have long been used in interior design, but they also have an important place in creating brand identities. One of the biggest breakthroughs I had when we were creating the Flourish identity was to create a mood board to show the team the kind of “feel” I wanted to create for the brand. You can see a part of the Flourish mood board above.

Mood boards are time consuming, so we don’t do them for every project; but they are invaluable as a part of brainstorming, sparking creativity and also streamlining your thoughts – not to mention communicating what you want!

I’m currently putting together a board for the flowers for the launch party. My PA trained with Paula Pryke, and I’ve done some flower arranging courses, and have a passion for flowers, so between us I think we’ll come up with something fabulous! I have an idea in my mind of what I’m looking for, but by getting it down on paper before I visit the flower market on Tuesday I can be sure I’m getting what I need.

Here’s how I’m doing it…

Step One: focus

I have a tight budget so I know I need to stick to flowers in season: tulips, ranunculus, anemones and greenery. I know my colour scheme should be purple, orange and green – the primary Flourish colours (but pink just keeps on creeping in!). And I know it needs to be simple to put together – so no crazy wired arrangements. I also know that I want a relaxed and informal feel (without too much primping and preening), but at the same time I want impact. Not too much to ask then…

Step Two: select anything that catches your eye

With my “brief” at the back of my mind I’m cutting from wedding magazines, home magazines and also scouting the internet for any images that appeal to me. I’m not editing too heavily at the moment. I know there’s a lot of pink creeping in – that’s because I love it! And I know I’ll need to edit that later, but for now I need to keep an open mind. There are also some gorgeous, tasteful, white arrangements that I would die for and I’m hanging on to them for now, but I’ll need to look at why I’ve included them later.

I love the “relaxed” feel of the white arrangement top right, that’s the “feel” I want. But I still need to get to the bottom of the look. I know that acid greens will look great with my bright colours. I also love the twigs in amongst the flowers in the bridal bouquet at the bottom right. And I think that’s part of the point with a mood board – you’re not saying “I want it to look exactly like this”, you’re creating a mood, setting the tone.

Step Three: Edit

Once I’ve gathered together my inspirations I can start to look for a mood, a theme and get a clearer picture in my mind of what I’m looking for. Some of the pink and white stay, but only because I like how they’ve been arranged, and that’s important for Rona (my PA) and I to bear in mind when we’re putting together the arrangements.

Step Four: Mount

Now I’m clear in my mind about where I’m headed I mount the images to provide inspiration. The finished board also helps me communicate so much more powerfully with anyone that works on this project with me.

I’m a huge mood board convert. So much so that we have run a couple of “mood board” sessions with clients to help them really get to the heart of their brand. A lot of fun and great for focusing the mind! And even if you don’t have the budget to work with a design agency on this, how about putting one together yourself?

Yesterday morning I hit the “go” button on the website. I took down the holding page, took a deep breath and launched the Flourish website.

After more than six months developing the brand: from selecting a name (that’s another story for another day) to developing the logo, choosing colours and rolling out the corporate identity, the website seems like the final step in making it all feel real. I’ve bought the champagne, ordered the cake and am looking forward to my first official day in business as Flourish!

I’m not certain we won’t tweak the design of this site. I for one think that the illustrations might be a little ‘plain’ compared to the homepage. And particularly for our ‘engaging’ brand, I’d like them to have a little more texture, a little more going on. But the challenge is that it’s hard to use stock images without them using cheesy. And you also need to have a theme. Now the obvious theme for flourish is gardening – and I love the images I’ve used on the homepage. But there’s a fine balance between metaphorical gardening images, and the whole thing looking like a seed catalogue! It’s a difficult balance…

So for now, partly because I’m exhausted, and partly because I want to see what the team think, I’m going to leave the website as is. We’re passionate about never missing deadlines, so I was delighted that I launched 24 hours early. And yes, if you look closely you’ll see that one page is waiting for content (the portfolio plugin I’d planned to use just didn’t work so it looks like we’ll need to code it by hand) but overall I like it. We do need to get the portfolio coded (and fast) but because our blog is so rich in case studies I felt it was ok to launch without it.

I’d love to know what you think about the illustrations. Are they too plain? Or do you think everything else (background and blog) are so full on that it’s nice to keep things simple? The jury’s still out for me, but I’m glad to have it launched. I’m off to slouch on the sofa with a cup of tea and a magazine.

Those of you that have been following the trials and tribulations of the development of the Flourish logo know how much hard work we put into getting it right. And those of you that can read between the lines probably know how much I wanted to just put the finished logo in a box and forget about it! Designing your own logo feels a little like childbirth – you’re pleased with the end result but you wouldn’t want to go through it again. (of course most of us do forget the pain and go back for more!)

So I chuckled to myself when a friend said to me “great, your logo’s done. What next?”. “Well where do I start?” I typed back. “erm… the stationery, business cards, website design, exhibition stands, brand manual, email signatures, folder, postcards, ‘leave behind brochure’… I could go on, but you get the picture.”.

Designing the logo is just the start of the Flourish identity. The impact comes from everything we do around the logo, the identity we build and the image we create. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sharing with you some of the whys and wherefores behind the Flourish brand identity. And here are just a couple of sneak previews.

Most small business owners will invest in having a logo designed, but they often don’t see through the whole process. They take the logo and throw together their own stationery, “knock out some leaflets” or take up that offer from a friend to design their website. The brand identity doesn’t reach it’s full potential and you miss an opportunity to create your best impression. At worst, the homemade designs undermine all the hard work you’ve invested in and that hard-worked for impression goes by the wayside.

It’s only by designing several pieces of marketing literature, perhaps a website or some stationery as well, that you can build up a true picture of what fonts, colours, imagery and illustration styles really work for your identity. We’ve test-driven several fonts and illustration styles before we’ve settled on the ones we’re using. Simply because when you actually but them into practice you find that they don’t work as well as you’d hoped.

And I’ve found that my “extra stuff” – the fonts, quirky illustrations and the photos we’ve used are what I love more than the logo itself. It’s the “heart” stuff, the magic, which blends so well with the sensible “head” decision of my logo. But you can’t have one without the other.

So I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t have your logo professionally designed. But from experience I’d strongly recommend that you set some budget aside for developing the whole identity. It will make such a difference in the long run.

Well it’s been a long time coming. A lot of heartache, blood, sweat, tears and frustration. But here it is. The Flourish logo.

Fonts

The font communicates warmth and approachability and we love it. It’s called Perec by PampaType and is so new that they’re still developing the complementary fonts so watch this space as we add to the identity in future. We’ve used Super Negra for the logo and  Super Blanca for the tagline. PampaType describe the typeface as “a sensitive sans grotesque with a good variety of styles for text and display. Versatile, delicate and contemporary.” And if you follow the link through to the Perec homepage you’ll see the “versatile, delicate and contemporary font” that I have my eye on! Hang it, here it is…

Isn’t that font at the bottom delicious? Perec is perfect for us: it’s warm, approachable, slightly feminine but strong and clear at the same time. There’s nothing fussy about it, but at the same time there’s a certain, something, about it – the curve of the “l” and the “i”, and the flick of the “u” that has that attention to detail and modernity that we just couldn’t find in any other font.

And of course there were rivals for Perec. We looked long and hard at Museo – a very modern slab serif. It’s a favourite of ours and we considered it carefully, but I don’t like the way the “u” bends both ways on this font. And whilst we prefered Museo’s “o”, we knew we were going to doctor that character, so it was less of an issue. And the curves and flicks of Perec just felt more right than museo.

The icon

I think this was the element we struggled with the most. We were so resistant to doing anything as obvious as adding a leaf to the words that we tied ourselves up in knots trying to be clever! Hence the grass, which just didn’t work – too fussy. But the leaf is stylish, simple and great for use on it’s own as a favicon (see next to the http:// in your menu bar) and also as an icon on our twitter profile. Thank goodness we realised we were trying too hard and went back to our gut instinct. I love how Caroline has executed this – simply, clearly and stylishly. It’s the clarity element of what we do.

The colours

I’ll be blogging more about our colour palette in another post as there’s plenty to talk about on that! Let’s just focus on the green. We’ve used pantone 384 which is a strong, muted, Autumnal colour which has the right balance of punch and welcome. Green communicates balance, sustainability and growth. So it’s a good colour for us. And just works so well with the visual imagery and the name.

And I was desperate to use orange, I really was! Orange is fun, sociable, creative and abundant – it’s essential we incorporate it into the brand. But it just didn’t work with the name and icon unfortunately. So orange will come in the rest of the identity somewhere – I haven’t given up on it just yet, but “flourish” was just crying out for green, and in the end we gave in.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who helped us get here. The friends, family, colleagues and other graphic designers who gave us feedback, ideas and focus. And most of all, to the brilliant Flourish designers who pulled it off! Thank you all.

Hurray!

Snow or no snow, in the Flourish offices we’ve been beavering away for the past few months developing the Flourish brand. And as I’ve blogged about before, being Creative Director, client and designer has been more than a little challenging for all of us. And so after much debate and U-turning and heartache, we present to you our three (almost finished) logo options.

We’d really appreciate a bit of objective input on this. Woods and trees spring to mind at the moment!

So what do you think?

Option One:

Option Two:

Option Three:

Our brief is creativity, strength, clarity, approachability, warmth, wit and humour. Obviously a lot is going to depend on what we put around the logos too, so I shall upload some sample stationery very soon to go with them. As ever, I really appreciate all your comments…

You can vote on the logos using our twitter poll, or just leave me your comments below…

A few days ago we changed the colours of the flourish logo to deeper, Autumnal colours. And now I'm happy with the colours, I'm now concerned that the font is weak. And much as I absolutely love the font, I'm not sure it has enough strength and impact for a logo.

Luckily Caroline shares my passion for perfection and has worked up a couple of others. I have to say, they have the instant impact and wow factor that I was hoping for. It'll be interesting to see how I feel about them on Monday, but first impressions are good.

The funny thing is, that when we create logos for clients, we always, always create three options for them. And this just proves why: because you've got to have something to compare it to.

We'll be posting the third option very soon. But let me know what you think of this one.