Branding and Squarespace Website Design for a Creative Copywriter - a Case Study
(Photography by Lisa from Imaginative Pictures)
The brief
Suzanne Frear is a creative copywriter working with passionate small businesses. Her brand essence is bold, playful and authentic and she was keen to get across the nurturing, human aspect of her business in a world of non-human AI trends. She has been working in a freelance capacity for some years but wanted to take her business to the next level - she needed a strong brand identity and a lively, engaging and converting Squarespace website with a powerful blog functionality.
My approach
Suzanne and I started with a full discovery session to delve deep into the brand essence, her vision and a really deep dive into her target customer. As a designer it’s important to me to understand how a business wants its customers to feel when they are interacting and experiencing the brand, so this is a big part of the discovery process. I started by compiling a mood board incorporating some of the key elements we discussed, along with general ‘mood’ imagery, colour palette and emotive words and phrases to build an initial picture of the brand.
THE branding
This evolved into a full branding suite featuring a warm, bold and playful palette of deep navy with pops of lime and gold to reflect her authentic and creative brand. The main logo mark incorporates a handwritten script font as a nod to that human touch alongside a strong but elegant block serif font.
the website
I built in the Squarespace platform, crafting a fully responsive and mobile-optimised website including custom coding. The website reflects Suzanne’s lively brand essence at the same time as being a powerful tool to attract and convert potential customers - a powerful blog functionality was really important as part of her marketing strategy and SEO work and a Squarespace blog is very user-friendly to update. I design a website around the copy rather than fitting in the copy to what I’ve designed - so it was a joy to work with a talented and creative copywriter!
The collateral
Suzanne needed a simple but striking business card design and this featured a hint of gold foil detailing for a touch of luxe. I also created a suite of social media templates for Suzanne to use to keep her brand messaging cohesive across platforms.
From the client
“Tamsin guided me through the process of defining my brand and really brought out the absolute essence of what I wanted my business to project. She used her design magic to create something that was so absolutely ME - it was so much more than I could have hoped for.”
Learnings
Working with Suzanne clarified the importance of the partnership between a strong brand identity, a powerful website, compelling copy and authentic personal brand photography. These elements go hand in hand to create a really effective and well-rounded visual brand that will deeply connect with customers.
