It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to write about new projects, and that’s because I’ve been too busy designing to write about designing!

Whilst that’s good, it’s nice that I’ve entered a quieter period and I can write about some of the new projects I’ve been working on recently.

Amazingly enough when I first spoke to Love in the Afternoon it was November of last year (2006), and I’ve had several conversations about the brand design since, however the project itself did not start until July this year!

It just shows how long it can sometimes take to get a retail business off the ground when you plan to do it properly. Love in the Afternoon will target high quality retailers with it’s product range and therefore the right image is vital.

So what does Love in the Afternoon offer it’s customers? The answer is vintage fashion and jewellery.

The fashion industry interest in vintage is fast growing and has been for some time but Love in the Afternoon is placing itself into a not too heavily exploited marketplace. The vintage fashion arena is one that could be called a niche still at this point, but one that is already quite large now and still growing.

We needed to develop a logo design for Love in the Afternoon that leaned towards an ‘art deco’ feel for their brand, and therefore following some concepts, the below logo is the final result:

Art Deco is a popular design movement spanning from 1910 until 1939, and influencing design in arts such as architecture, interior design, fashion, painting, graphic arts, and film. It was an amalgamation of different styles and movements of the early 20th century including ‘Art Nouveau’ - another very popular decorative and ‘modern’ style you may have heard of. Art Deco style is often characterized by geometric lines and angular shapes.

An example of Art Deco achitecture is The Chrysler Building in New York and in my own local town even …the cinema!! Our local cinema was built by 1936 and since 1998 has been Grade II listed. It still operates as cinema today.

Below is the first concept for the Love in the Afternoon website;
Note how the lady in front of her dressing table wears a camisole featuring flowers from the brand. Once the site is signed off and the design added to our portfolio you will be able to view this design in larger detail.

UPDATE 23/8/2007
Since I wrote this blog we’ve been doing some tweaks to the design over this time, and have arrived at the below design, it probably won’t change much from this if at all.

Although the unstructured look was appreciated by myself and the client, it was a hard decision whether to go for straight lines bordering the design instead of the jagged random edging, and following feedback from others the client advised that the straight lines were actually preferred by the majority.

This is good news, as although I was a fan of the unstructured look, it did come with certain restrictions; ie it could not expand vertically down to fit in more text and/or images per page, and as a result each page would be forced to have a limit to the amount of content on each page.

For some businesses, especially those visually orientated rather than information orientated this would be a fair trade off, but the fact that consensus was for the straight edged design from a ‘visual’ rather than practical perspective is great because this means that the site is practical AND visually appealing. Visual appeal is going to be essential for a fashion business.

The practical aspect is that once the site is built into a content management system the client will now be able input limitless text and content onto each page and the site will expand vertically down to accommodate it.

Of course this does not mean one should actually write pages that are hundreds of feet deep, no visitor really likes that even on a site they have visited to access information.

So this essentially is pretty much what the finished site will look like and you can view this in more detail in the web design portfolio, the pink squares on the homepage will feature product photos.

I know I’m excited about this site going live and I’m sure you are also. I’ll keep you all posted as to when it’s actually built by the developer!

UPDATE - 17.12.07
You can now view their recently completed stationery and product label designs! >>

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Design Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.