Water & Colour
Brand and website for whimsical artist creating watercolour works and hand-thrown pottery
Share on:
Ruby Robinson is a unique artist in Northern Sydney who is passionate about teaching watercolour art and creating hand-spun clay pieces.
Being a rising artist in the local area dominated by boutique and interior stores, Ruby understood that a digital presence would provide her with a strong platform to build upon in the future to gain exposure. She approached King Designs with a unique challenge combining a alternative, whimsical style, selling of prints and the creation of her brand and website.
eCommerce store for a niche model
Being a micro-market we foresaw a welcoming and reliable identity being Ruby’s key marketing challenge, given the prevalence of mum & dad audience engaging her brand. So we planned an accelerated go-to-market strategy that would allow Ruby to engage her audience quickly, begin strengthening her reputation, and be able to expand as her customer base grows.
From her overall vision for the brand and website, we distilled a minimum viable product that tied in with her current audience and service offerings, and developed a foundational framework ready to leverage organic, unpaid digital marketing tools: blogs and social media.
A whimsical style with a unique experience of wonder and imagination
Designing the aesthetic of Ruby’s visual and digital personality challenged us to craft a brand and site identity based around a style of artistic imagination specific to the wonder of animals. The brand needed to be as minimal as possible, express the alternative nature of Ruby’s art, and incorporate a feeling of whimsical freedom.
After experimenting with a range of different fonts, colour themes and central ideas, we arrived at “freehand” style welcoming a watery blue-red gradient scheme from one of her artworks. This was manifested into business cards, and tuition flyers representative of her style and work.
Left picture
Right picture
A user experience for imagination and fun
Ruby’s digital presence employs effective design patterns already established in the art space, such as minimalism, white space and portfolios.
This would ensure her audience resonates immediately upon encountering her brand and work, making it welcoming for parents, particularly, to consider commissioning her for a work or portrait.
Individual social media pages and stores were designed for a consistent online appearance and engagement with other demographics of her audience.
Building a minimum viable store
Making prints and works as convenient as possible for purchase is a key to selling original products – seekers respond more positively as accessibility simultaneously increases and becomes simple. Offering bespoke “buy now” buttons like this helps resonate with the emotions evident in the buying cycle of art purchases in Ruby’s demographic.
Social media share buttons enable her to leverage free marketing tools to expand awareness of her work through organic means.
Outcome
Having a relatively fast launch time meant Ruby could begin establishing a reputable name as early as possible, engaging her audience and continuing the development of her product offering and tone of voice.
As it stands, Ruby’s brand identity, website and digital strategy lay a strong foundation for future development, serving as an ideal platform for a brilliant artist sharing her work with the world.
Want to see your future?
See what’s involved with our projects and what you can do to maximise the potential of your business to make more money.
Have some questions?
Questions are normal and there’s many companies that have walked our Roadmap before you. Never fear, answers are here.