Branding and website design for the BLN
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The Challenge
The Business Leaders Network run networking and conference events. They have grown organically, and as a consequence, their logos and websites had no sense of unity and had begun to look dated. My job was to understand their business and ensure their new identity reflected who they are.
This was mostly a branding exercise with some limited interaction design for their websites.
Here's the starting point:
The Process
I spent a half-day of research with the clients and collected examples of brands they thought were similar to who they are. I sketched and later mocked-up some concepts in Illustrator so that I could get a steer.
Here's a few that didn't make the cut:
The final logos
The logos capture the conversation part of the brand through the speech bubble and the networking aspects through the multi-faceted colours. The founder of the BLN is also famed for wearing outrageously colourful shirts, which in part the logos attempt to represent.
It's now much clearer that these are a family of brands each with its own clear identity.
Wireframes
Slightly unusually for this type of project I was given wireframes to refine and apply the brand to, rather than create them from scratch. Sadly, there was no budget for usability testing at this stage so this was really just skinning and fixing any obvious usability problems.
Branded wireframes
The key deliverable for this project was a set of branded wireframes that showed a few of the main pages for the different event brands, so below you'll see pages from the BLN, the Internet of Things and the Business of Software.
The events pages take their colours from the logos to maintain strong identities. Some layout changes were made from the original wireframes to ensure the call to actions were more prominent and numerous as well as introducing social proof and guidance as to whether this is the event for you.
Here are the current live websites: