CTA Fire Print and Digital Design

CTA Fire are one of my longest standing clients. Together we've formed an ideal creative relationship that has seen me re-design their brand from the ground up as well as strengthen their marketing position both on and offline.

The CTA Fire company website was a major undertaking that took careful planning and consideration. I'd met with the client a handful of times to discuss their requirements and draft up a plan of action. Essentially, what needed addressing was the first-hand user feedback the client had been accumulating about their current website design. Feedback suggested that the content and layout of the current site was tailored to a more expert audience in the industry and that laymen and casual users were feeling less of the benefit.

A principle objective of the rebuild then was to restructure and broaden the content to cater to audiences of all experiences. In my redesign I placed greater emphasis on traffic signposting on the homepage and introduced dedicated category pages for products and services to help reduce clicks/taps in the user journey. In addition, further attention was paid to the interactive features, significant SEO measures were implemented to improve the site's ranking and a device-friendly holding page was devised for mobile traffic.

As well as repurposing the current website content, two brand new pages were also introduced as part of this brief; the Blog and Downloads sections.
I'd advised the client that an effective measure for encouraging SEO stability was regular content updates on a dedicated blog page. They saw the potential in maintaining a blog and therefore needed a simple solution that would enable them to publish things like updates to regulatory and legal information and news within their industry. I built them a basic content management system which uses ajax to interface with a database to create, edit, delete and retrieve records. I also built a separate file uploader into the same interface so that the Downloads section of the website can be populated with hardware manuals, certificates and other documents necessary in their field.

Now that the client is confident creating and amending blog posts at will, I am in talks with them about how they can stretch the reach of their posts to a wider audience via connected email and social media processes.

Throughout our working relationship I've produced countless print-based marketing communications for the client targeting a variety of audiences. The volume of these leaflets, flyers and brochures, coupled with the desire to keep each design looking fresh and varied, has afforded me the opportunity to explore the visual identity of the brand in greater depth. In doing so I've managed to develop the visual style from a fairly generic, corporate, and soulless identity into a much bolder, striking and confident aesthetic. The newly defined colour palette and strong mix of illustrative and photographic imagery is ideal for showcasing the client's products and services consistently both on and offline.