At the end of last year, Lukas Pospichal and Lenny Murphy came to us with an irresistible proposition… “…Will you redesign the GreenBook blog for us?”. Having already redesigned the GRIT report and the GRIT logo, we knew what a great opportunity this would be to flex our creative muscles and, of course, work with the team at GreenBook again.
After an initial briefing meeting from Lukas and Lenny, our first step was to lay the groundwork for a solid design that would fulfil the needs of the GreenBook team and readership. So, we started with a thorough review of the GreenBook blog and similar sites across industries. We already had strong ideas about what we wanted to achieve, with a simple and coherent layout being upper most. Lukas was also keen to shake up and update the site, creating a consistent layout across all GreenBook sites by using a header (menu and logo etc. at the top of a website).
Once we had conducted our initial research, we ran an online workshop with the GreenBook team that would help us get to the bottom of both the functionality and visual elements of the new site. As part of this we addressed the knotty issue of re-categorizing the entire archive of content, which GreenBook faced up to with aplomb! From this we wrote a creative brief detailing the project as a whole to ensure the Mustard and GreenBook teams were singing from the same song sheet.
As the project progressed it also became clear that updating the site offered us an opportunity to look at the GreenBook logo which had multiple inconsistent versions. We felt it important to harmonise the GreenBook brand across assets and we developed the following logo suite.
As you can see we adapted the GRIT logo that we designed a couple of years ago. The GRIT logo is well established and was well received, so it was natural to adapt it for use as the core GreenBook logo. This meant that GreenBook had a new harmonised visual identity that met their needs, yet was already familiar with their audience.
As the GreenBook website contains an incredibly large amount of information, both in terms of quantity of blog posts and the content on each individual page, it took a lot of thought and consideration to design the pages in the clearest and most logical way. Insight and research sites are often a challenge in this way, and it takes real expertise to develop an appropriate hierarchy and user experience.
The site went live this week (late December 17). We are thrilled with the results and look forward to hearing your thoughts. http://www.greenbookblog.org/
Want to chat about how we can help you? Contact Simon Dunn at simon@mustardmarketing.com