Home Furnishings eCommerce Website ... Not So Extreme Makeover!

The brief for this home furnishings online store was to revamp and update its existing website, retaining the brand look and feel and ensuring new content fitted seamlessly with pages (and other marketing collateral) which would not be changed, therefore ensuring the customer experience was continuous throughout the website. The purpose was to increase sales through the website, reduce the clicks-throughs customers needed to do to view the products and to create interest with seasonal and regional promotions.

Retirement Plus' Festive Website and Collateral

Bespoke festive graphics, featuring a Christmas holiday wreath: animated in an email to clients, as a printed Christmas card cover on a 2009 calendar and applied to websites on promotional banners and lozenges. http://www.retirement-plus.co.uk/

Retirement Plus | Lozenges

Graphic lozenges highlighting areas of interest are consistently styled across both sides of the Retirement Plus website. These lozenges are a fixed size and easily produced to be positioned onto the website. Here's a cross section of how they appear. See in position at www.retirement-plus.co.uk

Retirement Plus | Website Development

Retirement Plus recently rolled out a new website, designed by me and programmed by SEM Solutions. This site is split into two parts - one part focused on information of interest to the general public and the other part, focused on the needs of independent financial advisers (IFAs). The requirement, design wise, was to design a site which felt like one company and had a similar appearance, but easily identifiable as being in two parts. Visit the new site at www.retirement-plus.co.uk

Friends of Clapham Common | Developing a Brand and Logo

Friends of Clapham Common is a voluntary organisation committed to the protection and improvement of Clapham Common, one of London's green heartlands. I was asked to develop a logo and brand for them which they could use across a range of literature and marketing materials. Their website is still to be updated but learn more about their activities by clicking here. The image above shows variables on a theme and the image below shows how I came to this result.

Portfolio Review

The great thing about a blog is that its a wonderful way to keep a record of the projects you've worked on. Above are a few projects I've worked on prior to starting this blog covering everything from: Credentials, Presentation and Talk Books; Campaign Design and Project Management; One-off adhoc Marketing Projects; eCommunications including eNewsletters, eRelease, eInvitations; Brochure, Reports and Surveys.

Dream Homes Worldwide | Landing Page for Turkey

An interesting project this week has been designing a website landing page for an international property company - Dream Homes Worldwide - specialising in investment property worldwide, including Dubai, Turkey, Bulgaria, Spain, Brazil, Berlin and Canada. Focusing first on Turkey, the company will monitor the user response and if successful will roll out layouts and ideas to other country landing pages. You can view the results above or directly at Dream Homes WW Turkey website.

X-COMS | Launch Content

Here's the launch content of X-COMS, both the website and an eRelease, titled 'Are you feeling the crunch?'. We're planning a direct email marketing campaign, starting Monday. Visit our website X-COMS or read our 'Crunch' eRelease here.

Introducing X-COMS

X-COMS is a micro network of specialist marketing professionals with business facing experience and is a joint venture founded by Comarni, providing graphic and web design skills and Hummingbird Communications, a marketing consultancy.

By joining forces and creating X-COMS our skills in different but complementary disciplines are much more marketable, especially to companies that have no marketing resource within their operations. Joining forces means that we bring each others work to life and offer our clients a one stop marketing consultancy.

This isn’t the sum of X-COMS though, as throughout our individual careers we have been exposed to some fantastically skilled production and marketing people specialising in various disciplines. We can tap in to those skills for our clients when projects require them. This approach benefits the client hugely as they have access to highly skilled people without the overheads of employing them.

To find out more visit www.x-coms.com.

Radical Sports Cars Racing Sponsorship Proposal

We've just completed a one page website and 4-page brochure for a client who is competing in the 2008 Radical Enduro Series Championships. Check out the website plus view the brochure.

Humming Bird Communications Website Now Launched

Humming Bird Communications', a marketing communications consultancy specialising in the business-to-business environment, new website is now launched online.

Projects | Momui Home eCommerce Site | The Sales Process

When it comes to collecting cash there's no reason to reinvent the wheel - I have unashamedly copied exactly what Marks and Sparks do to get their quids in - this is not where fancy should come in to it!

Projects | Momui Home eCommerce Site | Shop Window

The home page of any website is important - but with an eCommerce website you need to be able to change its home page frequently to show your wares, much like a shop window. Here shows a series of promo banners on the home page to reflect new products, seasonal dates and features, plus sale time. Click on the image to get a larger view.

Projects | Hummingbird Communications

Hummingbird Communications is a new marketing consultancy and here is the brand I have designed for them today (hope they like it). Researching a great image of a hummingbird was my first task and after a whiz around the internet I found this sensational image, plus heaps more by photographers, father and son, R.W. Scott and Gregory J. Scott, who (it turns out) are based in Alpharetta, Georgia, in the United States. I emailed them and asked permission to use one of their images, and the charming Greg recognised it as a case of begging and has agreed a price my client is going to pay. Check out their beautiful images here - plus lots of advice on capturing this sort of image.

Projects | Momui Home | Homeware eCommerce Website | Brand Design

Momui Home is a new homeware and accessories boutique selling beautiful furniture, household items and gifts online. The eCommerce site is currently in development and here gives you a preview of how the whole site will look. My client, the owner, is a textile designer and loves texture, pattern, old roses, antiques, fabrics and fiddling with her sewing machine - oh, and the odd Barcardi. The brief was to create a romantic brand with timeless appeal to showcase the beautiful items she will be selling. Momui Home will be launching very soon. I'll update this post when she's up and running for business.

Brand Development for Marketing Sciences

Today I've expanded Marketing Sciences brand to include printed collateral to assist sales presentations. Included is a presentation folder (or capacity folder), a 4-page A4 brochure and application form.

Project | Power of Two

Here's an internal communication piece for a company which is merging two IT departments into one. Activities will include offsites, training and development and supporting collateral to inform staff of why the businesses have merged.

Concepts | Printed A4 Brochure/Report | DLA Piper European M&A Survey

The images in this posting show concepts for a printed brochure/report - the DLA Piper European M&A Survey. The first task I addressed is looking at the existing brand style (at the time a limited colour palette featuring blue and grey) and applying this brand to a A4 brochure layout.

After a chat with the client and a bit of thought into what I was going to propose, the next part of the job is finding suitable photographic imagery which can be used. Photography is nearly always purchased from photographic stock libraries like Getty Images or Istock. The trick here is to find photos with a common theme and photographic style to provide a consistent appearance to the document.

The subject matter for this report was a survey on European Merger & Acquisition trends. I suggested three concepts: 1) M&A Intelligence: Modern European images featuring cutting edge technology, contemporary architecture, contemporary colour palette 2) European Perspective: Featuring images from across Europe with a strong 'perspective'. Images included a new bridge in Spain, a cobbled road in Slovakia, a tree-lined boulevard in Germany, classical architecture in Italy 3) Intelligent Creatures:The firm quite liked the idea of using animals - so I suggested some great shots of insects.

The final document can be viewed via the projects page on my website.

Concepts

A big part of my job is coming up with concepts on how a business can deliver their message, and/or new ways they can deliver a usual message. So a new section of this blog is Concepts - more to follow soon!

Projects | Island Dance Website | Recent promotional graphic banners

Island Dance is Hong Kong's best dance school – teaching everything from disco freestyle and funky tap to ballet and ballroom; performing at more than 30 events annually; and teaching students from 18 months to well past 18 years. Along with my sister Kerry and our business, Es-preso Websites, we designed the logo, brand and website and regularly update content to the site, particularly with new graphic banners to promote their activies (which are always great fun). The graphic here shows just some of their recent banners since December. The target audience are children, teenagers and their parents.

Projects | What is equity release? website

Today I've been working on a sales presentation capturing all the information about a website I completed around November 2007. What is equity release? is a website which tells you everything you need to know about equity release in the UK. Its core audience are senior people, so, the site has easily identifiable colours, simple navigation and the ability to increase font sizes.

Women in Business Spain eNewsletter

I've been kept busy over the past week developing a monthly eNewsletter for WIBSpain, a networking group here on the Costa del Sol. Here are the results of the first issue, read online here.

Introducing Es-preso

My sister Kerry and I have a business called Es-preso. The intention is to produce 'small scale websites at a small investment' although in reality we keep being asked to produce big super sites with lots of investment ... doesn't anyone want a bargain!

Diagrams and Graphics for Presentations

Some of the corporates I work for have businesses, products and/or management structures which are complex to understand. Here are some examples of a suite of graphics I have prepared for the financial and business adviser Grant Thornton to support their client talk books.

RP | Market Leading Equity Release Products Campaign

Retirement Plus now have three equity release products in their range with marketing directed solely to IFAs. The image above shows a new promotional campaign to raise awareness of their market leading products; which include an email, printed A5 flyer, banner advertising and downloadable product criteria .pdfs.

Project Aardvark

A great project this week has been the development of a new brand style for Aardvark Real Estate, an international property development company providing exclusive and luxury properties to high net worth individuals and/or corporate groups. I've developed a number of concepts and here is the chosen brand, so the task next week will be finalising the brand elements (logostyle, colour) and getting the initial collateral such as business cards and stationery into production.

Chinese New Year 2008 | Year of the Rat | Kung Hei Fat Choy

Kung Hei Fat Choy to my friends and clients in Asia! Wishing you a very happy and prosperous year of the rat.

eNewsletter for Call Centre in Marbella

Marketing Sciences, run by my friend Brian, is just about to launch a new telephone call centre based in Ricardo Soriano, Marbella. I've been working on his eNewsletter which will be sent out next Tuesday. You can get a preview of it here (it's okay, Brian said I could post this here!). Plus check out the Spanish version here.

Capturing high quality screenshots for reproduction in CMYK printed documents

One of today's job is capturing screenshots for a 'How to use our website' guide which will be professionally printed. There are a few techniques you need to employ to do this well which I can never remember. So as a reminder to myself and to show what a highly techy, very difficult job being a graphic designer is (hee, hee!) check out the advice at Graphic Push - my gurus on this subject. There instructions have helped me whenever I need to do this type of thing.

Project Villapac

Today I've worked on a project I started around December (just got the go-ahead now to continue), which was to demonstrate how an existing brand's home page could be updated to a) capture new marketing opportunities b) retain existing brand elements c) to fit seamlessly with the existing website/brand (so no need to update entire brand). The business is Villapac, which supplies quality home furnishing packages to the UK, Spain, Portugual, Dubai and Morocco. Brian of Marketing Sciences is developing an 'afiliates and referals' direct email campaign and my suggestions are going to be used for this.