Great write-up on branding! Keep it up =)
Anatomy of a Redesign
Is it just us, or is everyone redesigning or rebranding this year? There have been a series of sudden and not so subtle brand adjustments made as of late. Notably by Gatorade, Tropicana and Pepsi. They all had their reasons, and each has had it’s customer base react differently. We’ve decided to outline exactly why and how we decided to not only rebrand, but redesign our web presence.
Redesign vs Reposition vs Realign
To be clear, we’ve redesigned our brand, realigned our website and repositioned the company. The semantics of that statement are important because each act has a specific purpose. A rebrand was ultimately inevitable as the company name changed from 1M Media Group — yes, a mouthful — to 1M Creative. Any attempt at a rebrand should be done carefully, and often over the course of time. A large organization could easily spend five years subtly adjusting their brand identity to ensure a smooth transition for their customers. We, on the other hand, are a small web design studio and happily are on a first name basis with all of our clients. Any change in our brand is immediately seen and discussed between between them and us. This allowed us to make a sudden and sharp change to our brand in 2008, and finalize the shift this year with the website redesign.
The rebrand’s purpose lay in keeping with the name change and enforcing our company identity and new position in the marketplace. We are not just designers, not just developers. We are consultants, whose goal is to improve your business’s online efforts through the use of beautiful design and efficient code.
Our website, too, underwent a redesign last year — just as drastic as the rebrand — but with specific goals in mind. The site had to showcase that we practice what we preach. Clean design, semantic lightweight code, usability, accessibility and findability. It was always meant to be a placeholder, almost a wire-frame version of what was to come. And to some, it may seem like a subtle redesign of a simple website; but in fact, it was a realignment of our online identity.
Room for Improvement
This version of our website was simple and clean. It was designed much like a blog to appear familiar to the eye, and its white space allowed for an eventual content rich website.
There were countless problems with this layout, but it suited our needs. Having such a content rich sidebar made pages with less copy appear weak and empty. The association between the red couch and our blog was nonexistent. Our client log-in area was lost in the page as just more website copy. The heading verbiage was simple and easy to read, but offered little context. Lastly, most all the footer information had no obvious value to our client base. Having identified the website’s weaknesses, we made a plan to improve and perfect the user experience.
The Process
We love red, known for representing things such as energy, strength, passion, and determination, so it was important to us to incorporate it into the original design. Originally, we used three shades of red throughout the website, which resulted it a very matte appearance. We wanted to pop, so we used depth, texture and over a dozen shades of red through out the new website.
Content is king, but context is the town crier. Since “Blog” was a lackluster heading for recent blog entries, “From the Lounge” was coined. Conversational and descriptive.
Calls to action are necessary evils, so we tried to not to use actual Call Outs, but rather identify goals and create clear paths.
And Then…
It took us 45 words to say who we were on the original website. One might say it sounded like we weren’t sure ourselves. Early in the design process, we embraced concise copy wherever possible. Now, in a mere 16 words we confidently announce that we are avid web evangelists who create attractive websites that enhance business growth and success online.
Recent or spotlighted work was given more real estate along with short contextual information on the project itself. If the intro statement didn’t drive home what exactly we do, the three-column service offering or calls to action would clear things up.
The sidebar is fully dynamic, showing you only what’s relevant to the page you’re on — offering you only the pertinent information to augment the core content. Lastly, an easy-to-read testimonial seals the deal. As you can see, typography and content strategy played a major role in the redesign — a much larger role in initial development, in fact. Originally Flir was used to utilize unique and bold font faces. We eventually removed the technology, though, believing the added design flair and moderate communication aide didn’t justify the loss in user experience and website performance.
Website navigation was kept simple, offering further context when links are hovered over. Our client log-in section was made smaller and subtle, but still easily identifiable. Its purpose is to allow those that are looking for it to see it, but not the distract from anything else on the page.
Lastly, we undesigned the footer altogether. The site isn’t content-heavy enough to justify a heavily designed or content-rich footer. So, we designed it to anchor the page, rather than appear as an extension of the website itself.
Conclusion
In the end, design is subjective. How well we executed this year-long redesign, rebrand and realignment is for you to you say. The bottom line is that we had a reason, a process and a goal. Without these things, any attempt at a redesign is destined for failure. Think about that the next time you decide to change your brand, image or message.
