Frenchy's is a well established beauty boutique with two salons in Edinburgh. They had just renovated their salons when they came to Design33 for a modern website that fitted in with their brand. After researching their salons and client base, my first objective was to define the Frenchy's brand. This began with redrawing the logo, cleaning up the flourishes and loops of the letters to make it scalable and web/mobile ready. And then creating a set of brand guidelines to establish their colour palette and illustrative elements, which together all tie in with the renovated salons.

Their previous website lacked personality and didn't speak directly to their users - something that I established early on in the discovery sessions, that was very important to Frenchy's. I achieved this mainly through tone of voice, and pairing that tone with bold headings and handwritten style comments. I kept the structure of the site very simple, very easy to navigate and really paid attention to how the user would want to view the key pieces of information - book an appointment, social media links and opening times. I contrasted the sharp, elegant white and gold background with splashes of the Frenchy's watercolour flowers, creating a feminine and chic aesthetic.

Chiene + Tait has been a national financial advisor in the U.K. for over 100 years, with headquarters based in Edinburgh. They needed a website that reflected their growth, heritage and authority without compromising on their internal values of sharing knowledge and being understanding of their customers' needs. At the core of this design, is a personality.

After workshopping with the team at C+T, we established that users on the previous site felt overwhelmed and confused by the enormous amount of content the site contains, and really just wanted to talk to someone. My solution, was to first organise the content structure more clearly - introducing side bars and accordion sections, to allow the user to quickly navigate each page. And secondly, to give this massive company a friendly face, a sense of personality. This was achieved by introducing several elements - people tabs, to serve both the user and C+T. It allows internal staff at C+T to keep track of which team members are responsible for which sections (something that was expressed as a problem during our discovery sessions with C+T) And it allows the users of the site to immediately get in touch with the correct people as needed. I also introduced a large search feature on the homepage which immediately greets the user when they first land on the homepage with a friendly "Hello, how can we help you today?" This allows the user to easily navigate to information that they're looking for and also establishes C+T's understanding and friendly nature.

Hampton have designed and typeset numerous books for Penguin Random House over the years, and I absolutely loved working on ‘The Crystal Code’ by Tamara Driessen. It’s a guide book, featuring more than 70 crystals that teaches the reader how each of these can be best used to help them feel happier and centred. I, along with my team at Hampton, laid out the copy and typeset the book ready for international release. In keeping with the overall aesthetic of the book, I also created some images and illustrations which help the reader to understand some of the content more clearly.

This was a handmade project for the Mumford & Sons album ‘Babel.’ This is one of my favourite albums, but after researching and listening to the album in depth, I arrived at the concept of “choosing strength in the face of life’s obstacles and darkness.” To represent this, I wanted to show something strong and solid on one layer, and something messy and dark on a lower layer. I created a strong, geometric typeface and cut it out of a clean, white board then laid it on top of a mess of black mesh and neon yellow. I then worked with a photographer to capture this and created the vinyl sleeve around this image.

Brewdog started out as a small brewery in the North East of Scotland, and is now one of the fastest growing Food & Drink companies in the U.K. It is one of Hampton’s largest clients, and one of its most varied clients too. I designed a selection of adverts and social media posts, as well as bar materials such as tap badges, menus, leaflets, posters, etc. Some of my favourite briefs included: designing icons for the Brewdog instagram highlight reel, and the beer cans for their Fanzine range. I also reworked existing beer can artwork to include content in both French and English and to comply with Canadian laws. These cans were in a 300ml and 500ml size, and are now sold in Canada.