Developing The Creative Intent Brand: A Tale of our Online Evolution

It's been an exciting year at Creative Intent as we've established our credentials as a creative agency, producing great websites and mobile apps for happy customers all over the UK (and beyond)! From the very beginnings, we made a promise that we'd work hard to develop our own brand and to show the world what our brilliantly creative team were capable of, and it's paid-off with great feedback and new client enquiries dropping into the inbox on a daily basis.

Ci - The Gamble

From its very first concept, the Creative Intent logo has featured the "Ci" which has now become recognisable to many around Suffolk. Our first real debate amongst the brand designers in the team was whether a simple two letter emblem would be enough to draw a user in and to communicate our message or whether the badge should be accompanied by the company name. As ever, we erred on the side of creative controversy, wanting to stand out from the crowd, and the simple Ci badge is now familiar to many who've visited our offices, followed us on social networks or seen one of our adverts in East Anglian publications.

Our subtle Ci badge adorns many-a-website across our portfolio and for many we are affectionately known as Ci and that's fine by us.

In the Beginning - Lighthouses, Beach Huts & an Alien Invasion!

In January 2011, we launched the first generation of our brand. A bold and vibrant orange offering to the internet that announced our presence and the skills which we had to offer. We wanted to do something a bit different, something that people would talk about, something to catch the attention of businesses that wanted something a bit more exciting.

The image below shows a screenshot of our first website in development. It encompasses a little something for everyone. The bright orange showed our intentions to unleash some risqué creativity when required, moving away from the standard blues, greens and monotones that adorn many business websites. The alien spaceship played on our "invasion of Suffolk" theme as we attempted to burst through rather then trickle along, and the Space Invaders game added a nice touch and kept many visitors battling the pixels on our website for collective hours!

One of the biggest challenges that we faced was whether to target a local market initially, or to boldly go national and attempt a coup. Having based ourselves in the picturesque town of Southwold, we found a collection of local businesses that were having to look to Norwich to find good quality, affordable websites for their businesses and so we decided that we could all benefit by Ci keeping a local profile for the initial few months.

As a result, we adorned our footer with a custom silhouette of the Southwold shoreline, another marque that drew many great compliments and has gone on to inspire many other creative designs in and around Southwold. Credit goes to our Creative Director, Paul Mayne who spent a great deal of time putting together the familiar artwork and working it around the footer of our site.

Reaching Milestone One - A Rebrand for the Summer

As websites by Ci started cropping up along Southwold High Street, we thought it time we turned our attention to a wider audience. We wanted to share our creative passion with Suffolk and beyond and we had a portfolio that we wanted to show off. And so, sat in a quiet corner of The Nelson in Southwold, we sketched up our grand plans for a rebrand.

The Ci had started to earn recognition and so we decided it'd stay. The lively orange website had caught the attention of many and whilst we wanted to keep an eye-catching colour scheme we'd settled on a slightly more familiar and comforting blue. It gave a more relaxing feel to the site and we wanted visitors to spend time browsing our ever growing portfolio and reading our blog without having to sport a pair of sunglasses (they're best kept for walks along our sunny seafront)!

An unfortunate victim of the website redesign was the much-loved lighthouse, pier and beach hut footer. It was a tough decision but we felt that the silhouette gave the impression that we focused our business only around Southwold and this was no longer the case. We were proud to be working with exciting Suffolk businesses Paddy & Scott's and Bramford Golf Centre, ambitious entrepreneurs Bobby White and Andy Proctor and a whole host of other businesses from Suffolk and further afield.

The image below shows the result of our redesign. More subtle, more enticing and with an emphasis on our work. But notice that the we've kept the eye-catching factor with an outstanding rework of the logo to the familiar yellow speech bubble that we still use today.

Adding further excitement to the launch of the revamped brand, the website was featured by creative showcase Creattica and received some great feedback from the creative community. A proud day for our brand and web design team!

One Year On - A Maturing Brand and an Exciting Future

Approaching Ci's first birthday we looked back upon an exciting year - where it'd all begun and where we'd reached along with many exciting achievements along the way. We are now working with a host of exciting Suffolk brands including Adnams and Munchy Seeds, a host of marketing and creative agencies that work with us to produce mobile and ecommerce apps for their clients and a sprinkling of corporate companies looking to add a creative spark to their in-house team.

Our portfolio was fit to burst and, yet again, we felt a redesign was required. What did we want to achieve in year two? Our ambition is to see Creative Intent continue to grow and help businesses across the UK to serve their customers to maximum effect making innovative use of new media including the internet and mobile platforms such as iPhone, iPad and Android.

In order to grow our client-base alongside an expanding creative team, we looked towards a more informative website that improved upon our search engine visibility whilst maintaining a high standard of creativity and showcasing the services that we are offer. As such, you'll find that our current website is powered by our very own CaffeineCommerce software package and we regularly update the site and follow our own best practice guidelines for content management.

The new website, launched in January 2012 and shown below, maintains an exciting brand whilst offering a complete and thorough introduction to the services that we have to offer. Once again, the new website was featured by creative showcase, Creattica for its attention to detail and crisp layout and we're very proud to have achieved such a great first year in business and look forward to seeing what new ventures 2012 will bring. We've already signed up to work with a new charity, a push-bike fanatical entrepreneur, not to mention a whole host of further developments with our existing clients.

Thanks for reading!

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