Mimi Faye creates handmade wreaths and home decor items for seasons, holidays and special occasions. She needed a custom brand identity, along with a website to represent her business and accommodate growth.
Bespoke brand identity including logo creation, icon pattern exploration, professional business cards and collateral, unique stationary designs, and comprehensive style guide.
WordPress multipage website design and development including contact form, personal customizations, security enhancements and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
As a new creative entrepreneur, Faye wanted a professional online presence to display some of her wreath designs to potential customers. Since she was just beginning her business, she needed a complete brand identity built from scratch, as well as business collateral including business cards, stationary and other accessories to position herself as a creative professional in her local community and at social events like craft fairs and festivals.
- Unique Brand Identity
- Responsive Portfolio Website
- Complete Brand Style Guide
- Brand Logo and Patterns
- Business Cards & Collateral
She really liked the idea of incorporating yellow into her color scheme as not only was this her favorite color which she was inspired to have as part of her brand personality, but also in color theory embodies cheerfulness, optimism, upliftment and happiness, all characteristics that she wanted to convey in her overall brand philosophy and her creative designs. Red was also considered to be included either as an alternative, or to be somehow incorporated along with the yellow.
The challenge with using bold or bright colors in a brand or theme, is that they could interfere with the message or distract from the actual product or services being offered. We were able to settle on a subdued golden color that paired well with a deep red, and that worked for her brand without interfering with the presence of her colorful and vibrant designs. The typeface used had an element of play while remaining clean and elegant, working for both web and print.
Originally the idea for the logo was to experiment with a wreath like formation around the name or initials. After designing some different leaf types I arranged them together in variations and then began stretching and tweaking, then finally refining them down to a consistent leaf structure and a single color while playing around with the positioning.
Through further refinement, the leaf logo design was simplified into a trio that would be versatile enough to situate into either a square or circular shape with her business name for use with particular social media outlets and specific business print products she would use, or as a rectangle for banners, cards and other business collateral and applications.
The color scheme put into place was able to accommodate accessible viewing with substantial contrast with its primary colors on a white or light background, or secondary colors on a black or dark background for either print or web. The leaf trio logo was flexible enough to work with the name or initials, the various layouts needed, and could even work as a standalone logo.
I explored different patterns with the leaves by creating skeleton versions, or outlines of a single leaf and the final leaf trio logo, and making a repeating pattern. I explored instances of her color palette with varying opacities for different applications. This pattern was ultimately used as a background on her website and incorporated into her own unique stationary designs.
It was important for the logo to be unique yet simple enough to be usable, viewable, and functional incorporated into the name. The logo depicts the product, is versatile and adapts to being scaled down suitably for different contexts, yet still recognizable.
The customer really liked the leafy half wreath design, but preferred her main business card layout to be a more simplified version with the leaf trio logo and wanted to incorporate the skeleton leaf as well, as she felt it suggested creativity.
We ended up with a complementary alternate logo version of the half wreath design that could be used on the front or back of business cards, for signs or advertisements, and even for other print and business collateral as she liked.
As a dedicated full-time coding professional for the medical industry, wreath making was a hobby turned side business for Faye, giving her a creative outlet that she quickly found her passion in. Starting out, she requested a website that displays her work, introduces herself to her audience with an about section, and allows potential customers to contact her. The website needed possibility of expansion for an e-commerce platform for when she is ready to branch away from just local customers and make her products available for sale to a broader audience in the future. Presently, she is very happy with the outcome of the website as well as the design deliverables, and the site meets all her current needs with room to grow.
