Thoughts about design
Right Choice Mortgages and Leasing: Brand Strategy
Starting from scratch, Right Choice Mortgages and Leasing wanted to enter the market on the right foot with a strong brand. For Right Choice Mortgages and Leasing, colour was important. Steering away from the standard corporate blue, a warm purple was chosen. The visual identity had to encompass their brand values: friendly, approachable and confident...
Website design for Two Up Brewery
Two Up Brewery is Perth’s coolest craft brewery, Joondalup’s worst-kept secret. We designed and built the Two Up Brewery website. It includes flexible content boxes that allow Two Up Brewery to change parts of their layout and content as often as they desire, while always adhering to their brand with little effort...
Annual report design: what’s changed
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a renewed interest in publication design. There was a time where many reports and publications were beautifully designed and printed to be “forever” books. Then we saw a switch to online, and discomfort around printing. We started to see businesses show real concern about the environmental footprint their...
Frankston Zero Logo
Logo design for Frankston Zero – an initiative to combat homelessness in Frankston...
New website for Surefoot Mat
Updated website design for Surefoot Mat, including new navigation and page structure to match the changing needs of their customers. Surefoot Mat have been clients of ours for over 10 years, so it’s been a wonderful experience getting to watch their business grow and evolve over the time...
Mornington logo for Northern Mornington Peninsula Tourism
This was a fun little project to take on, where we created an eye-catching logo to represent Mornington – friendly, casual, beachside. This logo has been designed for use on promotional gear such as t-shirts and hats...
Kids: handwriting vs lettering skills, why both are important
Continuing from my last post, another skill that I feel is important for kids to learn is lettering by hand. Not just hand writing, but being allowed to be creative with letters. This dawned on me a few months ago. My eldest is learning to write, and he enjoys writing the letters in his name...
Melbourne, we are out of lockdown!
Melbourne, we are finally out of lockdown! This week has been a little crazy helping a lot of you get some last minute pieces done in time for your reopenings (website updates, flyers, forms and more!), but we are so excited that many of you get to finally be back in your happy places, doing...
Art for Kids Hub – getting your kids drawing
Drawing by hand is such a big part of our lives here. Every design project starts with a sketch. We do some illustration too, so drawing is a pretty important skill to have. We all start drawing as kids. Some kids stop at a point, others keep going (and sometimes never put the pencil down...
What is brand development?
When starting a business, you might think of a logo as your brand. But a brand is so much more. A brand is the whole experience of what people see, hear and feel when they interact with your business. Visually, this includes all of your marketing material, advertising, website, social media, business stationery, uniforms, signage...
Are you getting spammed from your own website?
It might sound like nonsense, getting spammed from your own website – but it’s entirely possible. Do you have a basic contact form that you get lots of junk mail from? Are they taking time away from your day, sifting through what’s legitimate and what’s spam? It’s that moment you realise that you’re getting spammed...
Marketing after launching a website
There seems to be a mindset out there that websites automatically bring sales as soon as they are launched. As if the internet is a giant billboard and people will know to visit you. In reality, nothing is automatic. It’s better to look at your website as just another marketing tool for your business, similar...
How do Pantone colours work?
Following up from our previous post, I’ll explain how Pantone actually works. It didn’t even cross my mind that this would be a question as Pantone has become so ingrained in our everyday work. For us, selecting, referencing and using Pantone colours is as common as choosing what paper size we’ll use for a project...
Looking for a colour beyond your printer?
The dilemma of standard printing is that you’re limited to CMYK. But what if you want a colour that’s brighter than what CMYK offers? That’s where Pantone inks come in handy! While they are more expensive to print with, if you are after a colour that can’t be made with CMYK (the inks your home/office...
Things I love: zines
While corporate design is generally full of perfect grids and smooth lines, I am always drawn to the grass roots process of zines. As soon as I was old enough to travel to the city on my own in my teens, I found the little hub of shops under Flinders St Station – and there...
Websites and Copyright
Recently, I was chatting to one of our clients about her website content. She was rewriting her website pages, as she felt they were being copied from others in her industry. From this, the conversation about what’s covered by copyright on a website came up. The Australian Copyright Council has a great fact sheet on...
Should my business have multiple websites?
For businesses who have a variety of offerings, we are often asked if they should have a website for each part of their business. If we are talking very different businesses that play no part together – then yes, separate websites make sense. However, if they are related products or services, there is often a...
Publication Design in 2019
Publication design in 2019 has included small brochures, through to 80+ page books. I’ve never been able to put my finger on what the appeal of publication design is, but it’s something we love working on. Maybe it’s the process; maybe it’s the fact that everything has to be so orderly for a publication to...
COVID-19: what to do with your time?
What a strange time we are living in – a pandemic, something that happens once a century. Some of our clients are still going okay, but for many, they have had to wind down or temporarily close their businesses. We’ve had clients who have had to cancel or postpone events, too. The stress of losing...
Event Branding Design in 2019
Event branding design in 2019 saw us provide continued support and services to a collection of long-standing events. Some events we provide design services for were just a colour scheme and date update in 2019 (eg. Peninsula Film Festival). Others involved new illustrations (Pets’ Day Out) or entirely new branding (Musiqua). Posters for promoting events...
Website Design in 2019
Website design in 2019 has seen some big advances in supported code, which means we’ve been able to build websites beyond our clients’ dreams. HTML (the language that is used to build websites) is constantly improving, but it can take years for those new little bits of code to be fully supported. So a new...
Logo Design in 2019
Logo design in 2019 has been varied. We’ve been lucky to work on developing brands for a wide range of businesses, most based on the Mornington Peninsula. While the logos featured below use a range of colours, corporate blues have been popular in the past year. I personally find this a little ironic (or timely!)...
Rebranding? Don’t let your domain name lapse!
If you’re rebranding, you might decide to change your domain name. While it might seem like a refreshing or exciting change, here’s a couple of things that can make this tricky: Many customers will have your current email and website address saved as your contact point. Any previous marketing material, business stationery and advertising will...
The Wiggles: We All Start Somewhere…
We have preschoolers in our house, so The Wiggles are huge around here. I probably know more song lyrics than I should…but I digress. Wiggles and branding…what’s the connection? We all see how polished their marketing is today, but this article isn’t about that. It’s about where they started. We see a lot of start-up...
Book Inspiration: The Book of Bunny Suicides
The Book of Bunny Suicides (illustrated by Andy Riley) is full of dark humour, but we love it here for more than that: it shows how far you can push a simple idea. Andy has managed to stretch these bunnies and their lack of brains out across THREE books. That’s showing a lot of ways...
Innerspirit Property Styling: Business Cards
The ladies at Innerspirit Property Styling originally wanted to do black and white business cards, but felt there was something lacking. We went through all of our available card stocks and finishes, and came up with the following! Super thick black card (not printed, actual black card) with rose gold foil detail on both sides...
Online forms: one or many?
When converting traditional paper forms to online, it seems logical to create the forms like-for-like. But there’s a lot of hidden power in online forms that’s worth embracing. One of the situations we occasionally come across is a business who is using multiple forms for their clients. These forms are handed out, based on questions...
Microsoft Powerpoint: for screen, not for print!
Most businesses do some in-house design – usually basic office documents and forms. Sometimes this can extend to presentations, or even brochures. The types of programs used to create the artwork we have seen, have been quite creative, but not always ideal. The tricky part is that nearly every office has Microsoft Office in their...
Why is my domain name important to my customers?
Choosing a domain name can sometimes be just as tricky as choosing a business name. Your website is an important place for customers to find out more about you, so the domain name you choose needs to be considered. Here’s a couple of tips: 1. Your domain name doesn’t need to be your full business...
Inspirational People: Leon Logothetis
In both our work and in volunteering, we have seen both the most giving and the most greedy of people. Watching The Kindness Diaries on Netflix reminded me that thankfully, there is more good in the world than not – and it starts with us to keep kindness going. We honestly get so down when...
Selecting Fonts: Commercial Licensing
There are thousands of fonts out there to choose from. But did you know as a business, you need to have a commercial license to use a font? If you are creating anything for your business – whether your logo, a business card, packaging, social media images and so many more examples – you need...
Rebrand: Innerspirit Property Styling
Some rebranding projects we do are from scratch. Others, like Innerspirit, we joined in halfway. The ladies at Innerspirit Property Styling had tried their hand at an online logo service, but were stuck. They weren’t 100% happy with what they could create in the limitations of the program. They sent us what they had so...
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