Karen Haller is an Applied Colour Psychology Specialist.  She helps business owners to communicate their brand’s authentic business personality in colour, further strengthening their marketing message to increase brand recognition by standing out from the competition and increasing sales.

BEFORE: Recognise & Relieve old logo & brand colours

In analysing the old Recognise and Relieve brand colours Karen Haller found that the brown colour palette is from the colour family related to the Autumn season. The monotone variants of brown give an overall subliminal message of safety, seriousness, reliability and support.

Looking at the brand’s core values – aiding positive change, healing and self awareness in a calm and nurturing environment, the old brown monotone colour palette may have, over time, reflected a feeling of heaviness, reluctance for change and seriousness.

Karen felt the colour family which best suits the brand’s core values and aims is Summer. Cool blue based colours with gray added which reflects the cool, calm and elegant sophistication of this brand.

AFTER: Recognise & Relieve new brand colours

Some keywords related to these colours are honesty, calm, nurturing, reassurance and self healing. Perfect for the Recognise & Relieve brand.

LOGO OPTIONS: Recognise & Relieve logo designs

When designing the new Recognise & Relieve logo Tamlyn created three designs considering the brand colours and brand values to reflect the service which Recognise and Relieve provide.

The first and second logo designs reflect an evolution and simplification of the current Recognise and Relieve logo. The idea of using the figure was to reflect the services that R & R provide, the figures needed to symbolise pain and yet relief at the same time. The idea was to use a single flowing line to create the figure, symbolising continuity and strength.

The third logo is a purely typographic logo. Emphasis has been placed on the ampersand, but using a paler colour than the type allows it to not overpower the main typography, whilst joining the “i” and “l” show unity.

The fourth logo option is more of a mix between a feminine and serious approach. In order to balance the soft feminine curves of the ampersand  with an element of seriousness we have used an all caps typeface. The ampersand has again been enlarged to create a unity between the two words.

And the final logo?

After several iterations Tamlyn and Marina came up with the following. You can see that the font is now a quirky font to represent Marina’s quirky personality.

So you see logos aren’t just pretty graphics we dream up! When creating a logo design we take our time to explore a range of ideas which translate the values of the company and the service the company provides. Through a clever combination of graphic elements we create unique and meaningful designs every time!

We have been working hard on our newsletter, as we always do. And it’s ready to send! In this one the illustration was done by Tina and Amy worked on the graphics for the rest of the newsletter. Other newsletters often feature illustration work by Tamlyn – who drew our owls! Those of you who dont subscribe, you’re missing out! We almost always do special offers, games and prizes. Our latest creation involves a theme – “Make Do and Mend” which goes with the whole “January Austerity” feeling. No point in being frivolous and overly extravagent – it’s just not the done thing! So, in our newsletter we have listed “8 free or almost free ways to improve your presence online.” We do like the number 8!

We also like the number 3 – so watch out for the 3 offers within the newsletter.

Read it here and let us know in the comments below what you think!

At the beginning of January we launched our very first website of 2012 for Thanks and Recognition.

Thanks and Recognition help to create an environment of trust where people feel empowered to thank one another for good deeds they have done in the day.  It works very simply, if somebody does something that you value and want to recognise, you send an email thanking them for what they have done. Thanks and Recognition can then calculate how many times you say thank you in a period of time. There’s lot of theory around the subject and you can find out more on their website.

The site is built in HTML/CSS and has a WordPress blog. We used fading statistics on the home page and also embedded Thanks and Recognitions “Yum Yums & Employee Engagement” video which is a big hit in the Top Left Design office! There is also a blog feed integrated on the home page.

Thanks and Recognition were also kind enough to provide us with a nice testimonial too! Thanks guys!

“We are delighted with our new website. Top Left Design were friendly, helpful & professional throughout the process. They made sure we stuck to the schedule to get it finished by our own deadline and gave us very good advice. Tina was brilliant to work with, she guided us through the build with ease and professionalism. Thank you.”

As the majority of your clients will not pro-actively check your website daily for updates, you sometimes need to reach out to them to get the information across.

A good newsletter can not only inform, but also convert readership into sales – you should use a combination of striking graphics, pertinent information, and (depending on your brand) humour.

There are many things you should include in your newsletter to make it stand out from the crowd – here are 5 of the most important:

A good title

This is one of the first things your readers will see and is likely to be in the subject line of your email so make it fun and intriguing! Just naming your newsletter ‘Newsletter’ isn’t going to interest anyone or persuade people to read on or even open it - be inventive.

An eye catching picture

Visuals are always the first thing people see before they start to read your newsletter, a good image/s and good graphics will always catch someones eye and should convey what your newsletters about. Remember always make sure your images are relevant to what your talking about.

Relevant and interesting information

Don’t just talk about absolutely anything, its important that your newsletter is all about your business, subjects related to your business and the people in your business. Your newsletter can be personal, light hearted and you should always bring it back to what you do – afterall people signed up to your newsletter because there interesting in hearing about what your companies up to!

A call to action

As well as sharing interesting information your newsletter is also the perfect platform to encourage people to do something, be it signing up for an event with a discount or simply directing them to view the latest work on your website. Always encourage and direct people to get involved with what you do.

Links to social media profiles

What are social media profiles for – networking and communicating of course! If your involved with social media make sure you let people know, always include links to your social media profiles in your newsletter, you’ll be surprised at the amount of people which will regualrly click on these and follow what your up to.

5 examples of fantastic newsletters

Top Left Design

* I believe we included all 5!

The Bespoke Wedding Company

Carmen Bar De Tapas

Northstar

Caldesi

Good professional photography is essential for this genre of website, and thankfully, our clients recognise this with the beautiful images they have supplied to us in the past.

Read our blog post on professional photography in web design for more about that.

So without further ado, below are a range of fantastic food business websites that have been designed by Top Left Design.

Carmen Bar De Tapas

Carmen Bar De Tapas is an intimate tapas restaurant located in Clapham, London. The decoration and the friendly attentive staff create an atmosphere that will make you feel right at home.

A perfect venue to enjoy a romantic dinner for two, while also catering for larger groups of family and friends – It is a place to come and relax, and enjoy food as it is meant to be.

Goo Goo Gourmet

Goo Goo Gourmet offers an innovative delivery service for baby food. They understand that parents are busy, and offering this service takes away some of the pressure that comes with parenthood!

The Nut Hut

Nuts – the perfect snack! And with The Nut Hut, you can order customised selections of various tasty nuts and dried fruits online. They also do hampers for special occasions, and have a couple of physical stores set up in shopping centres throughout London.

Caldesi

Caldesi is an authentic Italian restaurant and cooking school based in Marylebone, London. Their website reflects the historic character that also comes across in their restaurant and food!
We had the pleasure of attending one of their cooking classes recently, and were shown how to make pizzas from scratch – delicious!

Limoncello

Limoncello are a catering company based in East London’s bustling Shoreditch area. They make and deliver lots of nice food, including but limited to sandwiches, buffets, canapés, breakfasts and packed lunches!

Berkeley Law

Berkeley Law is based in Mayfair. They are a boutique practice serving high net worth private clients and their families, advising on wealth structuring, tax efficiency, trust issues, asset protection, succession planning and relocation to the UK.

Saunders Law

Known for their many years of experience in criminal law, this firm recently relaunched itself as a limited liability law firm, owned and managed by English solicitors. We used different colours for each section and the website comes across as bright yet still professional.

Curry Popeck

This is a firm based not far from our offices in the west end, and we worked on making sure the colours were bright and fresh while still making it extremely clear about their services and why clients would want to work with them.

The Brooke Consultancy

The Brooke Consultancy specialises in acting for Small Growth Companies and Social Enterprises from start up to generation of significant revenues – and this website is actually designed as a long scrolling page, whole website is on one page with anchor links.

Aprirose

With this site we made a super cool script where you click on the person’s face and the box expands to show more information – check it out:

Fish Financial

For each member of the team, there is a unique testimonial which you get by clicking on the Read Testimonial link – genius!

Long Way Round

We kept with the textured postcard look and feel on this page that you can see on the whole site, and included nifty little “more” links.

OLIM

The profile pictures taken by their photographer were a unique landscape shape which makes this one a little bit different. And we have the little “More” link as well!

Petrus Financial

A cool little rollover script allows you to meet all the team by rolling over their heads!

Prescience

More outdoorsy shots of the team here.

Professional Financial Centres

The team here each have their little note card which we think is a nice touch!

CWB IFAs

Close up shots for all and another rollover script for support staff.

Association of Women Art Dealers

This allows an at a glance look at the current members of AWAD

Along with being a lovely lady to work with, she also gave us a fantastic testimonial here at Top Left Design to share:

“Top Left Design exceeded my expectations ten-fold. I wanted a new website because mine was old, outdated and didn’t represent the style of weddings or clients that I typically represent. Plus, I had done the website myself so the fonts, designs and SEO was not up to par. Top Left Design finished my website in record time and within three weeks I had two new bookings and four enquiries- a huge increase in enquiries from my last website! Top Left Design have kept my brand consistent by designing my twitter page, and they sat me down for an afternoon to teach me the etiquette of blogging! I highly recommend them for any website or graphic design project. Thank you Tamlyn, Keren, Tina and team.”

The site has a gallery displaying some beautiful images from weddings that Erika has organised, as well as a blog she regularly posts informative, wedding related articles on, keeping the Flutterfly Events website regularly updated.

Our lovely client at Carmen Bar de Tapas sent us a very nice testimonial last week after we launched their new website.

Here’s the testimonial they gave us here at Top Left Design:

“If you think that having a new website or renovating an old one is a bit of a headache think twice; Top Left Design understood my wishes, adapted to my requirements at once, and for me, dealing with them is a pleasure. Above all, they are so creative that they have highly exceeded my expectations in improving my site. They gave me a quote that suited my budget and once you see what they can achieve, you know it’s definitely worth it.”

We have also included Carmen Bar de Tapas as a case study on our website as we’re very proud of this site (as we are with all the sites we produce!).

Here are some more images of the site.

You may not know this, but we created a website for Prescience Film Finance, which is the company that financed the extremely popular and successful Oscar winning film – The King’s Speech.

A long sentence

For those who have not seen this movie yet, The King’s Speech is about King George VI and his early years as king where he struggled with stuttering and worked with Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue who helped coach him to be confident and competent enough to make those all important speeches as king of England! (whew!)

Communicate key messages with confidence

Here at Top Left Design, like Lionel Logue we  help with communication and help our clients communicate their key messages more clearly though our clean and clear straightforward websites, and we offer them the possibility to express themselves better, and feel more proud of their online presence. The more clear and prepared your message is, the more relevant and effective it is.

This movie is a good example of the importance of communication to achieve your goals. So if you have nothing planned for this evening, run to the closest cinema, buy a large basket of popcorn, make yourself comfortable and enjoy this movie, you  won’t regret it and in the back of your mind, you can think about Top Left Design and our amazingly clear communicative websites the whole time!