Rebranding A Web Design Agency (Behind The Scenes)

I've just rebranded my sevenf figureure web design agency and instead of showing you the final result, I want to go ahead and take you behind the scenes. I want to show you every single part of the process from positioning, strategy, design, development, you name it, we're going to go in this video. Step number one, we decided we want to do research. I've been running Flow Ninja for the past almost 7 years. Instead of just having a gut feeling, we wanted to understand what is our business actually like and what does our internal team think and what do our customers think. So if we see here, we start with strategy. We went through the discovery phase where we went ahead and identified the current state that is technically what does our internal team think. We've outlined the themes which we have from the internal team and of course because this is the internal discovery is not so beautiful but it has the most important information inside of that and you can see that here hey these are the some of the things that our team thinks seen as a vendor rather than a strategic partner for long-term web and growth initiatives possible cause lack of differentiated value improvements needed to internal strategic workflow approach and transformation arai task based project delivery clear definition of retainer project services etc ETA. Based off of that, we went ahead and created a document where we have all of the interviews with our internal team members recorded. We have everything what they said and what we need to improve with our overall brand in general. Then the ICP, ideal customer personas. In this case, we're also going to be going over everything that our customers thinks. Again, because we have a really good base of customers, we don't want to design something based on our gut feeling. So that's why we went ahead and had meetings with our internal customers. So you can see that here that we did have interviews with some of our customers. We have differentiators based on what do our customers say. So why did they choose us? What was the initial thinking before they started working with us? What was the thinking after And all of those small bits and pieces allowed them to make a decision. And we're going to be actually taking them incorporating them back into our brand. Then if we see which roles we work with, which are the personas, what's our messaging funnel, so like what's our marketing funnel, we've audited every single step of our marketing funnel and how the customers approach us. We went ahead and understand the market segment kind of who are we serving like are we serving more in market enterprise startups and kind of who are our good customers and who are not so good customers in that case. Based off of that, we started identifying our core differentiators uh and kind of what are going to be the goals for the website. What are some of the going to be maybe different strategies we can use for us internally? Which are competitors? How are we going to win? What ecosystem are we? What are the opportunities in the ecosystem? What are our enemies? And this is also like a really interesting point that every single time when we're doing a website, when we're doing content, when we're doing brand at Fall Ninja, we really like to introduce the enemy. So that the overall brand can seem much stronger. Because if you have an enemy, you're going to seem like you have a firm stance on what you actually believe in. It's going to be so much better for people to relate to your brand in the end. Then, are we keeping the name? Are we changing keeping the logo? Are we redesigning the logo? etc., etc. With all of those things together, you can see that even before we actually started to work on the project, we wanted to do the research, we wanted to understand the strategy and only then proceed to the next step where in our case the next step was actually creating a brand bible for flow ninja. Yes, a bible for the brand. It was my first time creating something like this as comprehensive as this. But it's actually the thing which is allowing us to push our new brands to every single one of the departments in the company. It's allowing us to go ahead and use AI properly so that if we're writing anything with AI, AI knows our tone of voice and it can actually write copy which doesn't necessarily seem like it's AI written. So I strongly suggest that you research the brand bible and also more importantly to research brand archetypes and to basically understand that concept and to try to identify which brand architect are you at your current company and by doing so you're going to be able to position yourself that much better afterwards. Of course uh we're slowly going to the design but not straight away. We want to understand kind of like our site map before we actually start producing anything. Sometimes we don't use wireframes. I would say most of the times we don't use wireframes, but we like to create these reloom like outlines where we're going to be having our website sitemap and every single section and every single page that we need to have on the website so that we can pass this to our content team that they can write copy. I've seen that like wireframes put us in a box and like just maybe give us an idea of how the website should look like without actually leaving us room for creativity. So that's why we believe it's better to have uh the sitemap pages and every single section inside of the page and then with that we can proceed to content writing and we only design when the content is ready but also we're creating the site map first because

we're going to be going through the our direction to the moodboarding phase and we're going to be understanding how our brand is going to look like and that's also going to take some time. So in the meantime, if we pass this type of a file to our content team, it's going to be so much easier for them to actually start producing content on their front. Now we're coming to the fun part and that's our direction mood boarding and understanding where our brand is going to go to. We always like to start with a moodboarding exercise so that we understand what we like and what we don't like for the brand. And this was something for me as a CEO which was the most fun but also most scary part of designing a new website because there is so many things you can do and it's so hard to identify what do you want to do for the website what do you don't and also we decided to rebrand so I mean like to change our logo as well which you can see in the back so we also wanted to understand what do we want to our logo to look like and maybe to take inspiration from some other logos and if we see here we've created like three different directions one premium one witty and one fun. And then we left comments on every single one of these directions to try to understand which ones we like, which we don't like, and how are we going to position ourselves based on these directions. And these examples don't have to be from your competition or anybody else like that. These examples are only there to see the visual aspects and kind of how do you want to look like visually. When we moved to logos, of course, we had the web logo, but you're also going to see that we did explore a lot of logos and we wanted to take inspiration from that vote uh together as a team on what we like and what we don't like for the logo so that we can get to a better version. Afterwards, we have explorations for interactions, uh some my ideas, some competitors, some competitors which are maybe not directly our competitors in the industry, but in general, they're doing something that we'd like to do in the long run. So with that said and with that voting said then we're moving to the next phase and that is actually starting to do some designs and this is where we've showcased the first art direction. This means that we've actually went ahead and we've designed our logo. So you can see our brand new logo which is incredible. I love it so much. So we might also add a show real of how our logo is going to look like somewhere here on screen so that you can see how we've actually came to the logo itself. But I think it represents our brand in such a good way because we didn't want to stray away from Flow Ninja as a name because it's so close to my heart, so close to our team members' heart and also talking to our customers, they seemed to love the name and to love the brand in general. So because we're going market and enterprise, we wanted a logo that's going to represent that, that's also going to have the fun element to it. So that's why we ended up uh with uh the logo type which you can see here which kind of looks like a ninja but it's still a little bit premium. So it's still like upscale. You still get a feeling that you're working with a trustworthy company versus actually maybe something totally fun but you kind of get an edge that like maybe some younger people who are really experienced are behind the brand. Then some ideas of the logo, how we came to the logo with different variations. We actually branded every single one of our products because we identified in the discovery phase that we're going to be having specific products in the company. So, we branded that as well. One of the things that we are going to want to showcase in the brand is motion. And a lot of our customers actually said, "Hey, you know what? I'm working with Flow Ninja because they're blazing fast and we want to showcase that with our imagery as well. " Uh, this was actually dropped, but again, you can see that some of the ideas that we had for photo shoots. Uh but in the end we decided not to go with this typography then like more ideas for images. We actually created an image like this. You're going to see it's looks so good. Uh different colors then how are the visuals going to look like? I mean like for our conference how are they going to look like on the cap on the website some kind of like posts on Instagram device overviews. Then also we identify that we want to have different colors for every single one of the brands. So you can see green, blue, this is kind of a like a greenish color, purple that based off of that we're going to have different elements for the logo itself. I mean like for every single product afterwards we've came to I mean like billboards but just to test our messaging and how does our messaging look like when we add the messaging, we add the logo and then we add everything else together. Some social media ideas, merch ideas of course, of course stickers like uh that's always a fun part of the redesign itself. So when we have something like this, it makes it so much easier to go ahead and design a website. So I know that this all of the rerunning process for us actually took about 5 months, but with the I mean with a holiday included in that because it was December and January, but we wanted to do it good. I know that sometimes uh when you're doing a personal project it might seem that you want to do something quickly, as soon as possible but we wanted to go ahead and go through the whole process that we take our customers feel it on our skin so that we can also improve the process afterwards which is I think a really good thing to do uh in general and then finally only after all of these

things we've actually came to the web design process and with the process that maybe I enjoy the most where we can have the most amount of fun but then you can see that We actually started designing every page. We designed it uh with components. We designed it in a scalable way so that it can be implemented inside of WebLow properly. Design mobile and desktop versions only. And uh this is the place where kind of we can see our brand shine and strategy, we can see our messaging, we can see our brand and everything else coming into a single place where everything makes sense. On top of that, we've done a lot more work kind of on the brand where we've designed our brand book. Like this was in parallel to the website. So for the brand book, we have our strategy, we have our wordings, we're going to have our logo and kind of how our logo should be or should not be used. Uh we have different colors, typography, we have a design system that we use, icons we're using, uh illustrations, motion, photo direction, how we're going to be using the brand in action, etc., etc. So you can see a small glimpse here of kind of uh what we're doing there. But it's a really interesting process when you actually have the chance to do everything from the beginning to the end and that you can see your brand actually come to life. And of course in the end we went ahead and developed everything in Buffalo. So uh at the time of recording the video, it's still in development. So by the time of publishing the video, we're going to be able to leave a link down below for you to actually visit the website and kind of see how it works and kind of how it functions in general to do maybe even give your feedback. But finally we went and implemented everything inside of Webflow with the help of our internal web development team and with the help of AI which was really interesting because it allowed us to speed up development of a website of this size so much because we were able to add uh kind of AI and kind of to develop GUP interactions like these with AI, develop some sections with AI and in general to make the overall process that much better when it comes to kind of the launch of the website. So with that said, I highly encourage you to start your process to start redesigning and launching your website and to maybe even get some tips from here and implement them on different client projects. And if you'd like me to record a little bit more in-depth overview of a specific process because I've done a highle overview of everything, feel free to leave a comment down below and I'll be more than happy to dig a little bit deeper. And also ensure to visit the link down below where you're going to be able to find all of the necessary resources to be able to learn how to build websites like these in your career or how to scale your agency. T.