Background
Floreat UK is a new workplace wellness consultancy, dedicated to promoting holistic health and well-being in workplaces and workforces. Floreat means ‘let it grow, blossom, bloom, thrive, flourish”. The business’s services encompass areas including nature, mindfulness, breathwork, and biophilia that aim to improve people’s wellness and performance. Our client, Lois Cliff, was the founder of BeeLoudWords, and a teacher of English, with decades of teaching experience, inspiring students in the best version of themselves, which led her to transform her previous experiences and passion into business in the wellness and fitness industry. The objectives of this project were to create a brand identity for Floreat UK that reflects its brand values in commitment to businesses and individuals, as well as emphasizes Lois’s personality and her high energy and engaging coaching style.
Restated brief
The client needs a logo design, tagline, and email footer, which will be adapted to her business websites and future promotions. Our first client meeting allowed me and my teammate to understand her vision and personality properly. After discussing the aspiration of goals, services, target audiences, and visual identity of the brand, we accomplished the restated brief immediately.
Major missions of the company:
- Showcase Floreat UK’s commitment to helping businesses and individuals improve wellness through consultancy services.
- Target all kinds of businesses, including small local businesses and anyone who wants to achieve better wellness in their workplace.
- Help everybody and 10% of all earnings go towards helping women and girls have a better life.
Initial thoughts on the visual identity of Floreat UK:
- Emphasis on the productive, sustainable, eco-friendly, and responsible aspects of the brand.
- Create a strong visual identity that is recognizable and memorable, which represents the playful and high energy level characteristic.
- Incorporate distinctive typography and could use color schemes of green, pink, and blue.
- Reflect Floreat UK’s biophilic design that incorporates nature into the workspace, which could use natural elements such as flowers, leaves, and bees as graphic representations.
Researches and ideations
A crucial starting point was the research of target audiences and competitors. In the Floreat branding initial research, we identified the potential target audiences ranging from female individuals of all ages, HR managers, educational institutions such as schools and universities (both students and staff), business proprietors, social enterprises, non-profit organizations, sustainable businesses, to healthcare institutions.
As Floreat UK aspired to remain inclusive and welcome anyone who sought their services, this inclusivity provides the opportunity to develop a diverse audience that includes businesses, individuals, and organizations committed to enhancing wellbeing in the workplace and advocating for social and environmental changes.
The personas highlight the two essential audience categories of Floreat UK, business owners and HR managers. Analyzing their core objectives and motivations ensures that our logo design effectively caters to the needs and preferences of these target users. For example, the first persona showcases a business owner, David, who owns a sustainable clothing company and would like to promote employees with sustainable and positive environmental values. A promising and biophilic iconic representation would be suitable and attractive to him.
Furthermore, the brand mainly focuses on female individuals in workplaces including HR managers shown in the second persona. In this case, an energetic and playful logo could fit Sophia’s needs in maintaining a productive and engaging atmosphere in the workplace.
Moving to the competitive landscape, we find businesses operating within the holistic wellness sector prevalent in using visual elements including organic shapes, earthy color palettes, peoples, and nature-inspired motifs to represent their values of wellbeing. These design choices evoke a harmonious connection with nature and people, while also communicating a commitment to sustainability and growth. These competitors’ logos have embraced contemporary and vector design styles, which promote a recognizable and distinctive brand identity, aligned with the modern branding strategies adopted by companies such as Apple, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Adidas. Our client also preferred a recognizable and modernist logo, that is distinct and simple and aligned with the contemporary logo trend.
We then created a Floreat Logo inspiration mood board, which gathered logo designs with several potential ideations and styles that resonate with Floreat’s core values. It included ideations such as line art, illustrative designs, typeface logos, elements featuring animals and leaves, therapy and growth, and people logos. After presenting to our client the rationale behind each logo concept, we boosted our insight into the client’s preferences for logo style and ideation. Typeface design that exuded a vibrant personality, as well as logos that featured leaves and people, particularly stimulate our client and effectively communicate Floreat UK’s dedication to fostering people’s growth and well-being. The logos in style of a combination of two ideas, including leaves and people logos, as well as bees and flowers logos, created a distinctive and unmistakable visual identity.
Additionally, the visual representation of bees was especially significant to the client, not only because it has been her previous company’s logo, BeeLoudWords, but also due to its profound representation in harmony with Floreat’s biophilic values. Our client also conveyed her preference for a specific shade of green, providing our team with useful guidance to begin with the design.
Design development
Logo design
With the client’s preferences now clearly defined and armed with a profound understanding of Floreat UK’s identity and a shared vision with the client, our design team eagerly began the next phase. Our goal was to create a recognizable and unique logo that captured Floreat UK’s core values and characteristics.
The initial sketches intricately blended various design elements to craft a compelling logo. We have chosen bees to symbolize Floreat’s strong commitment to environmental awareness. Additionally, we combined leaves as powerful symbols of growth and well-being. The incorporation of the initial letter ‘F’ of Floreat also added a signature to the brand. However, our supervisor provided critical opinions on our initial logo sketches and pointed out that some of the concepts, especially the bees ones contained too many ideas into one logo. These could be overwhelming to our client or viewer to understand the message. This prompted us to rethink our approaches to be less intricate and keep it strong and simple.
By further developing and redesigning ideations and variations among the logos, which were thoughtfully organized and categorized based on their underlying themes and ideas, it ensured our communication remained straightforward and concise for the client to review.
Our client prefers logos that blend the elements of a bee and a flower, which captures the essence of growth, sustainability, and environmental consciousness that Floreat UK stands for. Furthermore, our client is also delighted with the leaves and growth logo. These logos appealed to her as they symbolized the growth and well-being aspects of the brand and also conveyed a sense of groundedness and harmony with nature. While the client had not made a decision on the logo at that stage, and ultimately made their choice after we combined these options conducted with typography experiments.
Typeface experiment
In terms of typography, we initially presented three distinct typeface options to our client: script typefaces that promote playfulness and vivid movement, friendly typefaces that exuded approachability, and decorative typefaces that added an ornate touch to the brand’s identity. As the client would like to emphasize movement and playfulness within the typography, we have attempted to incorporate the handwritten style of the word ‘Floreat’ from the client. It seems to be a potential approach to emphasize movement with designated calligraphy typefaces incorporating wavy lines and a flourishing style.
It became clear among the options after our supervisor raised a critical point of consideration regarding the script typefaces. It could be inappropriate to convey a brand image that is heavily towards playfulness, which undermines the impression of reliability and professionalism that Floreat UK sought to establish. After experimenting with colors and typefaces combined with logos, we found that a better way to communicate the brand was the use of solid color, clean lines, and friendly typefaces, which established both the promising and welcoming attitude of the brand’s identity.
After renewing our typography choices with friendly typefaces and combining them with logos, our client immediately decided on the font, Gelica, which maintains a balance between the playfulness and seriousness of the brand. For the logo, the client has chosen undecided between No.4 and No.11. However, we found that No.11 could be less resonant for the audience. Our client ultimately selected the logo design that featured a delicate balance between a flower and a bee-like iconic representation. This choice resonated deeply, as it carried profound symbolic meanings while also remaining remarkably easy to remember. This design perfectly promoted Floreat UK’s mission of nurturing growth and well-being, as well as emphasizing the importance of sustainability and environmental consciousness. With the taglines, we all agreed to keep it simple by placing it under the brand name.
‘We both really like the bee flower. He’s done some playing with it, and it sizes down really well, and looks much more like a bee, which is cool.’
– Lois Cliff, Floreat UK
Nevertheless, the decision on the color palette brought about an interesting twist. During the color selection phase, the client expressed a preference for both the gradient and solid green color options. While both options had their unique appeal, we have decided on a solid darker green color to maintain brand consistency and ensure a unified brand image.
Upon the final logo’s delivery, however, the client made a subtle yet impactful adjustment to the color. Fortunately, our final deliverables provided flexibility and adaptable iteration to the client. This shift in color transitioned to a lighter shade of green that exuded a more vivid, vibrant, and natural feeling, which allowed the logo to breathe a renewed sense of energy and freshness into the logo, aligning even more closely with Floreat UK’s identity and values.
‘I really like the one you gave me originally but I’m the end I felt a lighter shade was a bit more nature-y! 🌿’
– Lois Cliff, Floreat UK
Email footer
Although contemporary email footers typically added the plain text of contact details and links to the end of an email, our client desired a more visually engaging and customized email footer for the brand. While experimenting with five compositions with various placement and layout of the email footer, a key consideration was the interactive function of contact details which would be prominently displayed with clickable links. This required attention to layout with accessibility and ensuring that the information was readable and easily clicked.
We lastly settled on a simple yet effective design choice for the email footer and incorporated a clean divider to separate the contact details from the brand logo, enhancing visual clarity. Additionally, we enlarged the contact icons to make them more accessible and user-friendly. After settling on the design, the final stage was to ensure that the email footer was not only visually appealing but also fully functional with clickable links. Although we realized that our client’s partner could handle the technical assets, we further pushed our team to create the clickable template for the email footer. We explored several tools and methods to create the clickable email footer, including signature generator tools like Wise Stamp and HubSpot, and by building the design in Google Documents.
As one particular challenge we faced was adapting our design to fit within the confines of email signature settings and these settings often constraints in capacity and formatting, we finally decided to turn the Photoshop design into HTML coding and build it further with Bracket, which was built into a template webpage and shows how the client could copy and paste to the email signature in the email setting.
Brand guidelines
In the Floreat Brand Guidelines, we govern the design rules of composition, visual elements, style, typography, and color treatment of the logo design and email footer. These guidelines ensure the consistency of brand identity across all communication channels and allow stakeholder to effortlessly adapt our email footer to their communications.
Reflection
Overall, the design meets all of the brand’s values and the client’s vision. We successfully navigated through each stage of the process within the tight two-month timeline and received positive feedback from our client on the final result. Critical feedback received from our supervisor and peers from real job meetings has given us invaluable help toward the final design. Throughout this project, I found the experience of working as a team to be particularly enjoyable and productive. By strategically allocating tasks based on our individual strengths with logo ideation and email footer design focused by me, and typography focused by my teammate. Our team effectively reduced workload and ultimately delivered results that satisfied our clients. I also gained versatile skills as a designer, including project management and communication skills in both written and online meetings. In the technical aspects, it provided practical experience in designing logos professionally by paying careful attention to details and striking the best result. For example, using grids to maintain accurate proportions and ratios. Also, pushing boundaries by creating email footers with HTML coding, to provide a mock-up solution for the client.
To reflect on the aspects to improve during the project, there are areas where we could have done better. One aspect was our communication and discussion during client meetings, being more confident in asking questions and defending our design choices would have facilitated more efficient and constructive discussions. These are beneficial in helping the client make decisions and ensuring the solutions are precisely tailored to their needs, especially regarding color choices of the logo that are revised after our final delivery.
This project has been a meaningful learning experience and equipped me with a valuable skill set for future endeavors in the field of design and branding. I have increased my confidence in managing branding projects. My initial reservations about branding design were dispelled once delved into researching and analyzing the market trends, as well as deeply understanding Floreat UK’s brand values. I realized that branding design is not just about aesthetics but also about telling a compelling story and effectively communicating a brand’s essence. I also learned that simplicity in ideation can be more impactful and communicate effectively than complexity.
‘The logo she and her colleague designed for me had real flair and creativity; I was quickly able to make my selection from their first range of suggested images, and then the detailed, focused tweaking of that image began, so that we could all be proud of the result. The font this team found for my branding was a perfect fit for me, with just the tiniest bit of ‘non-standard’ going on, which very much fits the brief. I enjoyed working with Natalie and am really happy with my new logo and email footer!’
– Lois Cliff, Floreat UK
RJ00603 | Floreat Logo and branding
Natalie Tang