For the last few years, I’ve been working with E.Photography. I created a new logo for them back in 2009. I helped them rebuild their website into a wordpress machine after their .mac freebie website went belly up. I’ve been helped them develop that website over the last few years, and we’ve been pretty happy with the results.
Since then, these wonderful ladies have been evolving. Their style has gotten much tighter. They were inducted into a very prestigious photography association because of their skill and talent. They’ve been growing up, both as professionals and as people. And with that, comes change. So they approached me in the fall of 2016 to start the process of rebranding them as ‘Elizabeth and Claudia’ to better reflect their partnership, and to modernize their brand in step with the shift in personality photography. They wanted to implement a new template that’s geared for photographers and revamp their website into a more image focused website.
We tried a few versions that kept the old logo, but the more we tried to fit it in, the more apparent it became that the viewfinder icon wasn’t going to work with the new direction for the brand. It was agreed upon to move towards a handwritten style wordmark. It took us a while to zero in on the exact font attributes we wanted, but we got their eventually – the last challenge was using either an ‘&’ or a ‘+’. We opted for the latter, as it felt more … done by hand. Overall, they wanted the brand to feel more intimate, as that matched they’re style of photography. They reverted their tagline and positioning back to ‘Your friends with fancy cameras’ from ‘We’ll make you feel famous.’
The wordpress template was from flothemes. It took me a little bit to figure my way through their system. After setting up the site with the tools available, I only had to make a few minor adjustments and customizations to the template to fit the needs and wants of Elizabeth and Claudia. I’m pretty impressed with the theme itself. It has a bunch of redundant features, but some really cool tools.
One of the things I’m proud of is the ‘mad libs’ style contact form. We’d implemented this style in the 2014 design, and I was able to carry it over and make some improvements to it based on some learnings over the last few years. I’ll be interested to see how it goes with the improvements.