Spartan Restoration are a newly established Startup team comprised of stone and brick restoration experts. After reading about the design and development work I'd carried out for
Rowin Design & Build the Client contacted me about bringing their vision for a brand and website to life in a similar fashion. Our initial meeting put us on strong footing as the Client came armed with a wealth of their own project photography as well as a digital render of a logo concept. We discussed the aims and outcomes of the project thoroughly before I set to work. With a plan of attack in place I first turned my attention to the logo design.
Logo design
For the logo design the Client sought to see a detailed Spartan warrior's helmet placed atop a tall, much plainer stone column. I explained that the balance of this rhetoric and the relatively wordy title would likely result in an unwieldy composition and jarring mismatch of styles. Instead I developed a reworking of their idea; an emblematic hybrid of the helmet and column constructed from simple vector shapes that merged seamlessly into one another.
I also explored a handful of my own ideas in order to see how the identity could be interpreted in other tones. Above are some of those endeavours which essentially aimed to creatively assimilate the helmet with other rhetoric, such as a layered cornice (inspired by a fascinating theory I read that exemplary cornicing designs were modelled on the profiles of human faces, often their architects), a typical stone-based flourish and even the letterforms of the company name abbreviation. Each lent a particular voice to the brand but it was my rendition of the Client's original suggestion that was nominated for the final logo design.
Website design and build
The Client had a sound understanding of the importance of an online presence and had already created social media accounts primed for launch for this new enterprise. That though was where their digital familiarity concluded, so during our initial meeting I held a consultation with the Client that secured them a domain name, set up a hosting package and outlined precisely what their website should aim to communicate.
Part portfolio, part service showcase, the website was going to cover all the usual ground needed to introduce a Startup to its market, but with an emphasis on highlighting common problems faced by customers and how each of the six core services offered by the business were a solution.
I designed the homepage to divert traffic to one of the six core services by way of a custom built revolving slider comprised of project photography and SEO friendly blurb. Following that are links to the three more business-centric pages of the site inviting users to learn more about the company and initiate contact.
I designed the individual service pages (Stone Restoration, Brick Restoration, Stucco Repair and so on) with user experience in mind, especially the wording of the copy which I also put together. These pages are designed to both exhibit best practice photography of the craftsmanship but also educate users on precisely what each service entails in laymen's terms, and in particular, which service will alleviate which identified defect. By putting the problems customers face ahead of the selling-point service descriptions and image galleries, users can relate to the content better and ultimately engage with it more completely.
The service pages also each carry a dynamically loaded image gallery that, like the rest of the site, scales appropriately for multiple device screen sizes.
To round off the project I consulted with the Client once again on how to establish an email mailbox on their mobile devices to ensure that the website's contact form communication could be delivered and handled in real time.
T-shirt challenge