A Busman’s Holiday
Today Brand Inventions finally launches a facelifted version of this website. The aim was to create a simple portfolio to showcase examples of the company’s work and display these case studies in a clean and simple way. Gone is the outdated WebsiteBaker content management system, replaced with a modified Uplift Theme which has been modified in-house by Lauren Cooper for Brand Inventions and which runs on a WordPress platform.
Ben says: It’s been wonderful to be able to devote a little time to our own website recently. It was horribly out-of-date and not a good advertisement for our skills and services. I’m delighted, finally, to have been able to bring it up to the standard of the websites that we design and manage for our clients and I hope it more adequately showcases a little of what we can offer.
Writing in 2013, when the Brand Inventions website last had a makeover, in an article entitled Throw Momma from the train! Ben attempted to describe the challenge of designing a website for his own company. He said:
We unveil our new look today. The results of our recent rebranding exercize are made public with the launch of a new website. We would be delighted if you would take a look and let us know what you think. It’s been a long, and at times, difficult process. Designing for your own company is surprisingly different to designing for a client. In every other instance you are adhering to a brief that has been discussed and agreed in advance. Our role is to interpret and implement that brief, (not always slavishly as I mentioned in an earlier article (The Role of the Designer), but nevertheless there are parameters and usually a clear steer on the project. When trying to create an identity for your own company you are having to put yourself in the position of the client. What is our brand? What do I want the brand to say about our company and the services we supply? Who am I, and, where am I going… or very nearly!
It is harder perhaps to determine these things for yourself, for your own business, than it is for another’s. Furthermore, not having quite the same time constraint makes the job harder, not easier. If you have an unspecified amount of time to complete the task, no rapidly approaching deadline, the focus on the project can slip. Creative types, on the whole are perfectionists, precisionists, anal retentives, who care about the position of every mark, every comma, every full stop. Without a brief, without an overly attentive or anxious client, without a cheque at the end of the job to sugar the pill, it’s a surprisingly different experience. Much like a painter and decorator whose own house is in need of attention and requires him to spend endless weekends at home on the DIY… or so I would imagine; the creative gift can sometimes feel like a curse. If ideas are like children, they can be long in the conception, difficult to give birth to and the product of your labours can often feel.. well, downright ugly. I think all creatives are familiar with those kind of feelings – the doubts, the endless revisions, the changes of heart or direction; the about-turns; the stops; the false starts.
And so it was for me over the last few months as I set about a new website for Brand Inventions. The equivalent of ‘writer’s block’ loomed large on a number of occasions. The remedy always, is just to keep going, even if you doubt the quality of the output. Inactivity is fatal. In Throw Momma from the Train, in possibly the wittiest & best-scripted scene from the film (and there are plenty to choose from); college teacher Larry Donner, (Billy Cristal), ends his creative writing classes by reminding his pupils that “a writer writes, always”. And so it must be for anyone who needs to earn his living through creative endeavour. An inventor invents. A designer must design. Everyone knows the difficulty of making the first brushmark on the big empty canvas, the first tentative mark on the brilliantly white sheet of paper, but harder still, inevitably, is knowing when you’ve made the last. At some point, you just have to put it out there.
Well, we’ve put it out there. It’s not perfect, it never is. Design, being a collaborative process, differs from fine-art in the sense that the painter treads his own solitary path – consensus and compromise are part of the designer’s art by its very nature. There’s a trade-off between the role of the artist and the role of the marketeer. A website may be a fancy shop window and ought to be dressed beautifully if it is to attract and inspire confidence but first and foremost, it’s a marketing tool, the most important asset in your armoury and it needs to be working hard for your business.