People are visual creatures. How many times have you been drawn into a shop or picked up a magazine because of the look? How often do you say “I can’t remember where it was, but it was near x, y, & z”? When a client tasks you with designing their website, one of the first steps is getting eye catching product photos. But what if the product is words? This exact situation arose when Deedpoll.com came knocking.
Turning Legalese into Art
Every client brings a unique set of requirements, requests, and a dash of rosiness. Taking a physical product like a handbag or an active service like house cleaning and creating branding is fairly straightforward. Challenging, but straightforward. But the question of how to brand a Deed Poll service… It is not what one expects on a Monday morning.
Before beginning the project, we had to truly understand what a Deed Poll is! To put it in overly simplified terms, a Deed Poll is the legal document needed to officially change your name. With that in mind, we set out to smooth the edges, metaphorical and literal, of their existing website and create visuals to evoke evolution.
When the Deedpoll.com team came to us, their website was full of useful content. And not much else. Changing your name is an exciting event, but we were looking at an uninspired, old fashioned site. Step one, create a colour scheme. Step two, add artistic shape to the branding, wording, and spaces.
The Colours and the Shapes
To ensure a colour palette that would elicit feelings of optimism, happiness, confidence, and peace of mind, we took a page from colour psychologists. Orange is known to be a colour of energy and happiness. Blue calls to mind peace and security. However, for their positive traits, orange and blue can be overwhelming or depressing. In order to temper the intensity of this combination, we elected to tint them to varying degrees. The background of the website got a peachy hue with the logo and accents being a bolder, but still tinted, orange. Logically, we selected a baby blue to compliment the peach and orange. By sparingly using complimentary colours, we created a very light visual tension that keeps your eyes moving across the page.
Speaking of visual movement, we felt the Deedpoll.com logo needed to represent the next phase of life that you enter after a name change. For us, the logical choice to represent such a life transformation is a butterfly. We all learn about the earth bound caterpillar who spins a cocoon and emerges as the gossamer-winged butterfly. What a beautiful juxtaposition with the name change process; humans close one chapter of their life and begin again under a new identity. At that point, it was time to explore font choices.
Gone are the days of name changes being mainly for marriage or family related reasons. However, “Deed Poll” is an archaic term as are most legal terms we use today. To convey a respect for the traditional naming of Deed Polls while bringing a sense of modernity, we selected a sans serif font. The open feel of sans serif fonts reinforces the happiness and calm of the colour scheme.
Laying It All Out
With all the important decisions made, it all came down to layout. Being a life changing service, providing the maximum information in the easiest, least intimidating manner was key. Dropdown menus along the top keep the main search phrases visible while organising the secondary search terms in a way that makes sense.
Keeping action options on each page in a pleasant presentation meant repeating the images and their links. So we created a side banner on each page using the illustrations from the landing page. This layout allows customers to stay connected to purchase options as they take their site journey.
The current iteration of Deedpoll.com presents everything you need to know, and maybe didn’t know you needed to know, to complete a legal name change in a clear, concise, friendly way. Between the rounded font, encouraging visuals, and welcoming tints, navigating the site evokes an optimistic confidence. After visiting Deedpoll.com, hesitant consumers feel empowered and the web traffic shows that people like our visuals.
