It's been just over a month since we took over Signature Signs in Rockhampton and what an exciting little journey it has been.
We wanted to update the branding to modernise and symbolise new ownership, yet felt a nod to the previous owner and the hard work they had put into the business over the last 33 years was important.
As my background is in design, I was excited by the opportunity to develop a logo for my own company. This proved challenging as my husband and I have completely different tastes and ideas so we compromised...and by compromise I mean I won!
Logo:
We started with the logo and as you can see, we have used the colours gold and navy blue to convey quality and sophistication; both traits our experienced staff ensure in all our work. The concept ideas to start with were incredibly varied and included abstract quills, bright paint splashes to represent the original sign writing and different font layouts. As with any design process we went through many iterations to come up with our final logo. We incorporated a text indicative of a signature in reference to our name and in homage to the original owner, we have kept and updated the paint brush and included 'est 1988'.
Website:
As our logo changed, the old website was no longer in keeping with our brand. Though not a web designer, I relished the opportunity to design our website using Wix. It was a bit of a learning curve transferring the domain name, ensuring our emails were still connected to our domain, building forms for customers and learning about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is still a work in progress. I try and add to the website a few times a week, updating the layout for mobile, adding new images and updating our services. Overall though, if you're thinking about doing your own website and you're not sure were to start, give Wix a go - they have lots of tutorial video's.
Social Media:
This has been the most exciting part for me, creating a social media presence for our business around Central Queensland. Uploading photo's, creating posts, adding stories and developing ad campaigns has been really cool, particularly seeing the likes and shares. However, it can become a little obsessive, so if you're one who has checked out our Facebook and Instagram, thanks very much.
Stationary
A new logo meant we also had to update letterheads, business cards, invoices and our email signature. This was all reasonably easy, but we wanted to ensure the right look for our business. Designing business cards is a tricky one too as you want to ensure the text is readable. When our business cards arrived it turned out the smallest text was readable...for me, not so much for my husbands old eyes! The business cards were a little rushed though as we needed to have something ready for my husband to meet clients, so they can definitely be updated next time.
Despite being a designer, I had never actually created a letterhead before so that was a bit of a faff, but all it took was a quick Google and I was able to fix that one.
Still to come...
We are just in the process of updating our exterior sign which still includes the old corporate identity. In addition to that, we are also updating our work shirts for our staff. All of this is a work in progress as it takes time and money, but with a bit of luck, this time in 6 months our branding will all be updated and we can ensure consistency across all of our marketing.
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