Introduction
It’s our task to create a new logo and a website for a psychotherapist, Birgit Plaugmann. Our client is an experienced psychotherapist with her own studio. Birgit Plaugmann’s current style of website and logo is very playful with many colors incorporated into her design. Our job is to create something aesthetically pleasing while still fulfilling our clients wants and needs.
In this synopsis we are going to discuss the process we went through in order to design a new logo and website; that Birget Plaugmann was satisfied with, while making it successful in design, and appropriate for her target audience.
Problem field
Our client presented us with a few challenges from the beginning of our assignment. Birgit Plaugmann was satisfied with her current logo and three websites. Which in design quality were not the best solutions for informing her future clients (target audience) of her abilities as a professional. She was very keen on bright colors, and using many colors within her logo and websites. This however does not translate over very well in design. Her websites were also very confusing and cluttered with many links. Also she had conflicting tastes eg. Childish but want’s to be professional. She want’s still to have similar elements, and would like to keep her website colorful.
Another issue we were presented with was creating a website when we as designers in this course at UCN have no experience as of yet in doing so.
Problem formulation
How can we redesign Birgit Plaugmann’s visual identity?
Method/Theory
Research was used in order to gather information on what people in Birgit’s profession where using for their logos and websites. We found a lot of inspiration and examples of good Logos and Websites during research. We then incorporated these inspirations into a Moodboard to help visualise what direction our design would go in. SWOT was used to understand what strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats a new visual identity would present Birgit, and how we could come about overcoming design obstacles. Again PESTEL was used in a similar fashion to help us overcome obstacles that are faced when creating a visual identity. Mindmap was used to organize our ideas much like our Moodboard.
And finally we used the the business canvas model to help us better understand what exactly this particular business needs to become successful at marketing itself with a new design.
Analysis
Birgit Plaugmann is a professional psychotherapist and her therapy focus is on couple therapy, family therapy and individual therapy. Her studio is placed perfectly in the center of Aalborg. This is good for business as it is prime real estate and close to many potential customers. These potential customers can easily come and go there by bus, car or other transportation methods. She has had a long term presence in the business as she has been working as a therapist for many years and has her own center. She is a professional therapist, but her website and Logo doesn’t represent her as the professional that she is.
Her websites are a bit confusing, because they are not well organised and have many categories and menu bars. Also her website and logo both use many different colors. This makes the logo not stand out and even over clutter the page.
Among things that she would like to keep for the current designs is her favorite color blue and a playful but professional vibe. She also likes transparency and playful elements. We find that these elements are do able if we can tone down some of her bright colors.
Birgit’s logo was similar to a print company because she used a color “wheel”.
Her logo doesn’t fit her business because it doesn’t tell her story, or the story of her practice. Also the gradient’s in it are too playful and do not match with the background color. However Birgit would like to keep the meaning of the different colors in the logo, as they represent the chakra colors.
The webpage doesn’t show that Birgit Plaugmann is a serious business women who cares about her customers. The current page is not a good representation of what she is capable of as a professional Therapist.
Conclusion
Birgit Plaugmann has several methods she uses while treating her patients. On her current websites it can be very difficult to understand exactly what it is she does, this is why in our new design we decided to merge all three websites into one, which is a much more simplified version of the three. Although we have grouped her serviced differently, the amount of information was not jeopardised. As it is important for her target audience to have as much information as possible about her practices we have brought over all the information in her three websites to the one website we have created.
As her old website’s were unstructured we have made sure the new website is very concise and to the point by making a menu bar at the top of the page, and no sub-menu bar. With only one menu bar it is easy for the clients to navigate to what they are looking for. We have grouped the information into five catagories; Home, Behanlinger, Om Mig, Kontact, and Respons. These caregoies are the most important to her website and this is why we have organised it that way.
As for the background we have gone with a solid white color. With a white background it’s easy to read the text on the webpage. Because Birgit is a fun and bright individual we have added some colorful aspects. We have taken the logo of the “stepping stones,” toned down the colors and added it to the background. This creates a fun but pleasing design to the eyes. This design is not too much for the customer to see, but keeps her playful side on her website while looking professional. As for structure we have used a grid structure and put the text into a box like grid system.
We chose to keep the colors Birgit Plaugmann already used in her old logo, because it’s very important for Birgit Plaugmann to still keep her and her business’s identity. We however changed the colors transparency and shapes and position. We created a ladder, which represents the client's journey to health and self acceptance. The colors are getting more faded to the top of the logo to represent the good and healed phase of the journey.
Lastly we took new photos of Birgit and her practice, these are high quality photos that give a better representation of her office, and an updated professional portrait.
Lastly we took new photos of Birgit and her practice, these are high quality photos that give a better representation of her office, and an updated professional portrait.
