Bead Hive: Branding

After speaking to the owner it helped clear my direction in this brief for rebranding. The key thing I felt was important for the branding to reflect was the boutique style rather than a craft shop. His audience being predominately female meant that the branding could be more focused towards a gender and be more stylised rather then more plain to attract both genders.

I didn't want a typical and generic look with the imagery of bee hives or honey or the childish kind of clipart thats related. I wanted it to be elegant and current playing to this bespoke boutique style appealing to an older audience.

I started focusing on the letter B to create an icon for the brand trying swirling lines which is the kind of atheistic normally associated to female boutiques. When I started doing this I realised that it was similar to bee wings. I started pushing this more and more trying to get the full image of a bee through the letterform 'B'.

 I ended up with this form of a bee on it's side.

 I then traced over this in illustrator and experimenting with different line styles to vary width in stroke and added droplets to create the eye and antennas.

 I developed this more trying to get as smooth a curve in the form as possible.

After finally achieving this I selected a clean sans serif typeface to title the brand incorporating the word boutique which wasn't originally used to reinforce the image.

 I played around with colour after looking into a bit of psychology. Purple is creative and imaginative. Gold wisdom and success. Blue is trusting and loyal.

I went against gold due to the cost restraints of the client. I knew this finish would be me costly and impractical.

 I decided to go with a soft grey and the rich purple as not only did the purple work as the creative and imaginative side but also the luxurious boutique.

I wanted to show the rebrand in context to show the owner how it could work across the media he uses.

 I experimented with layouts for the business card trying to keep it clean and simple working with hierarchy of information.

I wanted to keep the visual side with just the icon to make it stronger using the reverse side for all the information.

The most important thing I feel was the website due to it's current unfunctional state and how online networking has such great potential for the shops success.

As this was just a quick brief I wanted to not go to deep into the possibilities so just did a rough sketch of a simple, organised and accessible website applying the new branding.

Original site:

I then laid out the sketch digitally stripping the site and organising it into separate sections for the different aspects of the sites functions. 

I then worked with how the images would look on the homepage. I struggling to get an overall look that meant the text was legible, it wasn't to heavy in the brands colour palette and was inviting and friendly.

Overall I muted the palette so it wasn't to heavy but the text was still legible over the image. I used the slideshow box as the main function of the homepage which can switch through snippets of information such as welcoming, workshops, new products etc. This gives instant visuals to those browsing on the site for no particular reason, guiding them to browsing options.

The three links below give options for the owner to publicise and connect with customers through the promotions, current styles or location. These can be adapted to different features appropriate to the stores progress.

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