New branding and website for a Chelsea style guru

The nature of our work – designing, being creative, looking after our clients, completing the projects commissioned – hasn’t changed in the past three months, but the delivery and communications of the work? That’s another story. We now have a set of new clients for whom we’ve written proposals, started projects, designed an identity and gone live with websites – who we’ve never met in person. Meeting via Zoom has become not just acceptable but the standard, saving everyone involved hours of travel and waiting around without negatively affecting the work. Meeting in person does have it’s benefits though. Designing an identity means understanding personalities – and that’s particularly true of what I call ‘signature businesses’ (like mine!) with the name of the owner at the top of the page. A case in point of such a recent ‘lockdown client’ project is this new branding and website for Chelsea style guru Alessia Nicolini.

Here’s the remarkable thing: I’ve still not met Alessia in person – despite it turning out that she’s a neighbour, running her office from the same building as us. But we’ve made it work – very well – and I am incredibly pleased with the outcome.

Elegance and clarity in a single identity

When we first discussed this project, Alessia had named her business ‘AN Fashion Consultancy’. I tend to find initials suit some businesses rather well: for instance a smart firm of painters and decorators, large corporations who merge, or situations where initials become a colloquial form of reference. None of these scenarios quite work for a business focussed on very personal service to a high-end clientele. So we pitched the idea of using Alessia’s full name, despite it being longer. Alessia was intrigued – and once she had seen the logo, agreed. It works really well – plus, for me, an Italian name rolls off the tongue effortlessly – chic by default!

To further enhance the sense of a personality-led business, we trialled a calligraphic approach to the identity. Working with a handwritten typeface we’d sourced, we played around with the spacing and enhancing the letterforms. For instance, the double-S in Alessia has a deeper dip in the second letter than the first. The brand design is then rounded out with a pale pink and grey colour palette.

Our stationery design sets the stage for the website, applying a smart border around the edge, which we’ve chosen to emboss on the business cards, giving an polished, tactile finish.

A standout signature website

With Alessia’s work being totally discreet, there was no possibility of using sample images from her recent projects. Instead, we’ve opted for a careful choice of licensed photos. Choosing to work with stock imagery is a tricky business – we invariably prefer custom brand photography – but a combination of discretion and the lockdown meant that our options were curtailed. However, we saw this restriction as an opportunity to devise a specific visual language, where sections of garments were tightly cropped, all using a limited, crisp colour palette that chimed with the brand colours.

This curation of purchased imagery is a smart move and enhances the sense of a consultancy which has a clear purpose and direction. When creativity is your business, a sense of your own aesthetic needs to be at the heart of the company’s website. And so it proves here.

Alessia’s viewpoint and sense of style will further come to the fore over time within a fashion blog we’ve created for her. In a situation where a portfolio of work isn’t possible, presenting a set of viewpoints setting out how you see relevant trends to your clientele is another approach. In particular, Alessia works with brands and online retailers in ventures where they collaborate, so we anticipate posts bustling with custom location photography and well-chosen social media posts.

This project is a classic example of a business with bags of potential. It represents everything visual and verbal the creative director holds dear and showcases that as a specialist service to a loyal client base. Our work has been to ensure that the Alessia’s brand is a strong reflection of all this. It also only goes to show what can be achieved remotely – all our client communications, design and website build were delivered via WhatsApp or Zoom from our respective homes without any loss of impact or creativity.