Little Hands Little Feet

Little Hands Little Feet are a leading day-care and afterschool facility that pride themselves on providing a fun, safe environment right in the heart of South Belfast. We’ve been working with Little Hands Little Feet for a number of years, from the development of their internal graphics and collateral to their external wall designs on their mobile classrooms. At the beginning of the year Little Hands Little Feet approached the team at Kaizen Brand Evolution to audit their brand. They felt that their brand presence needed revived both in print and online and wanted to lead the way in their marketplace. We were first tasked to solidify the LHLF brand at first by creating a set of brand guidelines for the business, setting the tone for the brand and providing a clear guide of how it should be handled in print and digitally.

We created the brand guidelines for LHLF revitalising the personality and brand culture of the workforce and experience that the children have when attending through design. We re-set the logo and brand colour palette to reflect a more fun brand outlook and overall contemporary brand identity. We provided the owners with a hard copy brand ‘bible’ outlining the new direction, palette, typographic direction and photography style. With this set in place we were then able to proceed with a new image library, branded collateral and web design.

Our in-house photographer visited Little Hands Little Feet for a photo shoot with the aim of capturing the creative, exciting environment at LHLF. The shoot spanned each room available on the premises as well as the interactivity the staff have with the children. The shoot was bright, colourful and messy at some points, which added to the new brand direction. Following a shortlisting process the new image library has began rolling out across a number of items from Interlocking Folder designs to event calendars supplied to exiting and potential parents.

With the new brand guidelines and photo shoot in place the next stage of the brand audit was the website design and build. The owners wanted the new Little Hands Little Feet website to reflect contemporary web trends utilising the new photography and colour palette in creating a highly visualy, engaging experience for existing and potential customer alike. We designed and built a clean, photo-led website with optimisation in tablet and mobile environments. Each page of the new site provides the user with an engaging, informative and playful experience, much similar to the offerings available at Little Hands Little Feet. New typographic styles and colour palettes have been introduced throughout the new site reflective of the new brand guidelines. (*The investment in brand guidelines at the early stages provides a solid foundation for the evolution of the brand and shows how the brand should be rolled out and controlled. They provide the designers and business owners with a clear understanding of progression and brand use which is agreed upon by both parties before any collateral is created or designed.) Navigating through the new site the use of white space provides clarity and support to the fantastic new photography. The new Little Hands Little Feet website stands out amongst the industry landscape highlighting how adapting and auditing your brand both on and offline can seriously affect your business for the better.

The brand audit of Little Hands Little Feet ensures consistency across the entire brand collateral. The audit highlights brand values clearly and concisely across all new and future brand exposure. With brand consistency comes trust and trust in a brand is one of the key elements for growth and brand sustainability.

Visit website: littlehandslittlefeet.org

Web design for Belfast Music Production Academy

The team behind Belfast Music Production Academy contacted us recently with the request to design and build their online presence. After researching the marketplace both online and locally we decided to build a content led website focusing on the courses and software Belfast Music Production Academy offer guidance on.

Courses are held in physical location here in Belfast and while optimisation for search engines is paramount the focus on converting leads into course attendees is the primary focus of the website. Working with some of Ireland’s greatest I’m most successful producers Belfast music production Academy is in an amazing position to assist has many people as possible on their journey into learning electronic music production.

Built on a content management platform, our primary aim from an administration perspective is to reduce the time required to update the website and manage the payments from course attendees.

We are extremely happy with implementation of the website and will be following this up with considered marketing campaign utilising social media channels and E-newsletters.

About Belfast Music Production Academy

BMP Academy has a single aim, to help you learn the art of electronic music production, giving you the opportunity to grow your skills alongside the best in the business. BMP brings together some of the biggest names and rising stars in the electronic music industry, creating a professional network with the skills, capabilities, contacts and resources you need to build your career in music.

Loco Pizza

Loco approached Kaizen Brand Evolution to create a contemporary brand identity, menus, website and interior graphics for their fresh new pizza place situated in the East Point Entertainment Village, Dundonald. Loco’s mantra ‘mad about pizza’ highlights their passion for great tasting, hearty pizza. Not just your run of the mill pizza joint, Loco aims to cater for the masses. No matter how you like your pizza fix Loco caters for groups, parties, children’s parties, take away, table service and walk ins all which are welcome come lunch or dinner. Boasting a range of non-pizza items such as burgers, wings, salads & dessert pizza’s they’ve got you covered whatever your preference.

With all things considered and the target audience identified we created a brand identity that is fun, engaging and a bit mad. Textured, disjointed type flows through the Loco brand reinforcing the strapline ‘mad about pizza’ and with the addition of a brand language sporting slogans such as ‘in pizza we crust’ we created a platform for an engaging tone of voice. The branding balances hand-made design and modern graphics successfully, establishing the business as the stand out Pizza offering in Northern Ireland. Our research and development into Pizza restaurant branding provided some obvious results such pizza illustrations and Italian themes. We wanted to create a brand that was unique and one that would stand out amongst the crowd. When you visit Loco you will not see an Italian flag or any cliché pizza illustrations featured in the interiors or menus. The owners came to Kaizen Brand Evolution to create something different, an identity that would stand the test of time and one that customers could easily buy in to.

As well as the new logo mark and brand identity for Loco we created all aspects of the brand roll-out for launch such as the menus, website (coming soon), interior way finding system, window graphics, social media posts, napkin designs, table toppers, loyalty cards, over-bags, pizza boxes, receipts, t-shirts and custom wallpaper for the interiors. Loco have a great understanding of the importance of branding and utilising the team at Kaizen Brand Evolution as their brand guardians. We offer this service to all of our clients and when it comes to rolling out branding we, as the creators of the brand can oversee any aspects of print and digital materials that may be needed.

A key element of the Loco brand is the new website which we are completing as I write this blog post. We have focussed on the user experience for the design of the Loco site, creating a one-page site where most content can be viewed through a scroll of the mouse as soon as you land on the site loco.pizza. Utilising the stunning food photography of Fergus Jordan at White Cloud Photographic we created the site with the vision of prioritising the mobile experience following research into the users preference when visiting restaurant sites 80% of which where viewed on mobile. This knowledge then sets the precedent for the likes of portrait imagery, clean, concise typography and user interface design that is visually engaging. We look forward to the roll out of the site across mobile and desktop in the up and coming weeks.

It was a pleasure working on the branding and roll out of Loco and as another hospitality brand features in the Kaizen Brand Evolution portfolio we are excited for the future of Northern Irelands eateries. From our experience branding some of the countries leading hospitality brands, Northern Ireland has so much to offer whatever your taste and Loco is certainly top of the list when it comes to Pizza!

www.Loco.pizza

Branding The Future

We were approached by Adam / Founder and Director of the Future 17 Conference to develop a new brand identity and strategy for the up and coming tech conference for teens. Future was born out of frustration at the lack of tech events aimed at teenagers and was therefore created with the sole aim of inspiring the next generation of tech leaders.

After their first event, which hosted speakers from TIME’s list of most influential teens, they are now hosting Future17, a one-day tech conference and hackathon that aims to inspire Northern Ireland’s teenagers to get more involved in the tech industry. By using a unique model and organising a tech conference around a hackathon, they ensure that attendees get the most from this experience: not only will they be able to develop their skills first-hand by ‘hacking’ together a product, but they will also receive talks from some of the leading people in the technology industry today. The ultimate aim of the event is not only to inspire the next generation of tech leaders but also to make teens see code as more than lines and squiggles on a screen and appreciate it for the magic that it is. This founder has his sights set on a number of high-profile digital superstars to lead the conference to be held in the Titanic Building, Belfast.

We set the new Future 17 tone of voice around the primary mission of ‘developing greatness’ which symbolises the over arching theme of the event, inspiring the future of tech and digital/online developers. In keeping with the younger, teen target audience we aimed to create a brand identity that communicated effectively with this age group as well as potential sponsors. Adam, the founder has already secured solid investment from the likes of Twitter, Kainos and the MCS Group, all championing this growing industry in Northern Ireland. With this in mind, we created a clever brand mark utilising the ascender in the ‘F’ device with it’s own speech bubble mark. This subtle device speaks volumes across all marketing material on and offline. It immediately visualises the essence of the talks at the conference and is easily adapted across the brand.

As well as the primary ‘F’ mark we introduced an additional, more fluid ‘F’ device built from a data map concept. This secondary ‘F’ is used across the brand in more abstract, high impact fashion. The founder of Future 17 thought that this additional device spoke volumes across marketing material and liked how versatile it became when rolled out across the conference graphics on stage and delegate material. All in all, there are two key components to this brand, the contemporary primary brand mark using the speech bubble in the F Ascender and the ‘Data Map’ F which adapts the playful, secondary colour palette.

In keeping with the contemporary brand identity, we introduced Calibre as the brand typeface. The surge of circular typefaces in 2016 has been incredible and this one in particular fitted perfectly with the Future 17 ident, clean, concise, on trend. The supporting imagery with the Future 17 brand was chosen to inspire and intrigue, high impact scenic photography of skylines and the night sky symbolising the potential of the delegates and their future impact in tech.

We are extremely pleased with the final branding of the Future 17 conference and look forward to the roll out as the build up begins for 2017. Here’s to the future of tech in Northern Ireland. If you are interested in attending the Future 17 conference please follow the link below for tickets and any further information. http://www.future17.co/