Branding Refresh and Blog Relaunch!

I can’t think of a better first post for my shiny new blogging platform than to talk about the work and thoughts that went into this branding refresh and blog switch!

First, I’m so happy to say that we are re-launching view from my heels, the blog that started it all and my IG namesake! Moving it onto the squarespace platform and combining it under my website feels like it’s taking a big grown up step forward. A quick refresh on the back story – I originally started this blog in 2010 with little to no idea of what it was going to be about so I gave it a super broad name. and I used to wear heels a lot more than I do now. ;) it quickly evolved into a design-based outlet for my ideas and a place to track some of the projects I was tackling in our home. Some of those old posts make me laugh and if you’re so inclined, you can still find them here. Then as I started working with clients, it became a great place to showcase that work and provide more details than I can on Instagram. I always wanted it to remain a place where I could talk about all the things – not just design – so I stuck with the name as my business grew. Now I’m recommitting to the blog and plan to post once a week about both design-related and non-design-related topics. Help me stay accountable!

Ok so onto the refresh! I heard once that a website needs a refresh about every two years and that’s just about how long it took me to get the itch to update things around here. I loved the original design of meredithroddaydesign.com so I didn’t want to change it drastically at all. I found the person who helped me, Meryl Breidbart, through a referral from Kelly (who is helping me on the project management side of MRD). We cleaned up the logo, unified things like links and fonts, made formatting changes and updated the colors. Seemingly all small things but nonetheless things that took months to complete! ha! Mostly because I was fitting it in around client work.

The first place we focused was the logo because it basically drove everything else. I had the idea of adding color and possibly breaking up the box around my name (ultimately though that didn’t look good!). Here are the options we looked at to start with. I knew I wanted to change the color and the font but keep the overall look similar. I thought that removing the corners of the box would look cool but it looked a lot better in my sketches than it did in real life. Here are the options Meryl sent to get started.

The biggest change was adding greige to the design and pairing it with black font. I don’t even want to say how many greige colors we tried before landing on just the right one! Let’s just say I was picky! I ended up liking the existing font style but we thinned out the line to a lighter weight line and it instantly looked fresh. Here is a comparison of the old logo vs the new one.

We also reimagined the “mini logo” that I use for smaller places where . I had one before too but I found that it was hard to read when it was sized down. Meryl came up with a few ideas.

Here’s the comparison between the old one and the one I landed on.

The other changes we made may be less obvious but we incorporated the color throughout the site, added lines to create clean breaks between sections, and ensured overall cohesiveness on the site. Meryl was a great partner - responsive, helpful and nice! I’d recommend her work to anyone looking to do something similar!