Creating a Business Identity – Before and After
I was interviewed for a magazine this week on how to create a business marketing kit and I thought this would be a good time to give an example of the identity creation process with a project hat I recently finished.
One of the promotional opportunities that I offer on a site that I publish for my local community are articles focused on a particular niche with some very cool advertising and SEO options for businesses in that niche.
While contacting businesses that were related to one of those articles, I met Pedro Juarez with Poker Pool Plaster. Mr. Juarez was interested in advertising; however, he needed a web site and someone to put together his display ads.
He was in luck, because that is just what I do.
Mr. Juarez had tried launching a web site for his business a several times before. He had a Yellow Page site on pokerplaster.com and another package site on pokerpoolplaster.com that was never finished. I had to register a new domain name for him at poker-plaster.com as the other two domains were locked into the other service providers.
(This, by the way, is another example of why it is so important to always keep control of your domain name.)
Building a Business Identity
What we started with was the business card below and a disk of pictures from the client’s previous jobs.
Mr. Juarez didn’t have color preferences other than that, so it left the possibilities wide.
Looking through the pictures he provided, there was one in particular that struck me. It was of a Mediterranean style pool and cabana with warm stucco and tile and turquoise water.
That picture ended up being the inspiration for the rest of the identity work and is currently the header image for his web site.
Selecting the Color Scheme
Once the picture was chosen, I sampled the colors below from the photo to create the color scheme for all of the identity pieces.
Creating a Business Logo
The name, Poker Pool Plaster, gave the impression that the business only providing plastering services, which is not the case. After discussing it with the client, everyone agreed that making a slight name change to “Poker Pools & Plaster” would be more representative of the range of services that the business provided.
A logo was created using the modified business name.
Business Web Design
We decided to create a site for him using our Business Builder web site platform. It makes it easy for the owner to do updates themselves to the content. A photo gallery was also included so that new images could be added with a simple, one-click upload.
Rounding It Out
To finish off this starter identity kit, a new business card was designed, and of course, what good would a new web site design be without a banner ad to go along with it.
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Posted In: Marketing Tips, Small Business.
Tags: Business Identity, small business marketing, small business websites
August 11th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
These are great tips for new companies and some that just need to understand their marketing better. Thanks for sharing!
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:59 am
That’s a really interesting take on upgrading a web presence. I never would have thought of that. I’ve always tended to start from scratch when redesigning my sites, but now I think I’ll try a bit of what I see here.