the process
Ocean Ready came to me as a brand new business. Just over the line of concept and itching to get something tangible that represented their core values. I worked with the owner, and newly hired operations manager, to create a brand that would be able to work as a system across 12 different sub brands, as well as turn that brand into tangible marketing assets and an overview website built in Webflow. Here's what that looked like.
research
With this brand being so new, there was no former data to work with when generating ideas for what this should represent. In order to hone in on who they were as a company, but also how to stand out from their competition, a series of 5 mood boards were created to evaluate.
Based on audience personas generated by their core business model, we brainstormed and came up with target customers to base our data off of. In conjunction with the moodboards I was then able to organize a series of ideals and avoidances to being working on the brand.
ocean city moodboard
coastal moodboard
system moodboard
logo first approach
Maybe this is obvious, but without a logo or an official brand to work with, what else were we going to create, right? So the first priority was to nail down the main logo, and then create a system to follow.
With 12 brands under the parent company, it was important that this be adaptable and recognizable all at once. Below you'll see the first round of concepts (minus a few other options as well) that were shown.
final brand
The final brand took quite a few more explorations before returning back to our first round to clean up the concept they just couldn't resist.
While trying to incorporate an icon mark was originally a priority, the Ocean Ready team quickly realized that no matter what we built it just felt like someone else in our town already had it.
This left us going for the minimalistic, and non-traditional color palette, of the brand that is Ocean Ready today. Clean and modern, the Ocean Ready logo was built to appeal to the luxury market, and sustain a long life as they grow out their suite of brands.
component-based wireframes and design
After we finalized the logo we quickly moved into the website design. Before any bells and whistles, we again went through the moodboard process to gain a better understanding of what resonated with their tastes and goals of their first website.
Since this website was the first, it was also important that it function as the component library for the future brands, and it be adaptable enough that the continuous development of components as well as simply reusing ones from the original site with color swapping, we could create a system that would be undoubtedly a recognizable Ocean Ready product.
After we were able to hone in on the important must-have's for launch through interviews and research, we moved into the wireframe phase.
designing and launching in webflow
After doing an analysis of the needs of the website, I was super excited to be able to recommend Webflow as their CMS platform. Not only because I have been doing design mockups in Webflow for years now, but being able to save time to get this website out the door quicker, by basically eliminating the standard development phase of re-templating in another CMS, was very valuable to their team.
development integrations
I also worked to integrate many integrations into the Webflow environment that were not out of the box components. First, the slider on the homepage of service cards was implemented with an external library that I manipulated and retro-fit for this environment and their brand.
The second integration that I build into the website was snazzy maps. Being able to incorporate a Google Map that fit more into their dark UI was very imperative to the brand vision and really helped drive home the Ocean Ready brand.
The last integration was with Zapier and Sales Force, so we could connect the database and the website leads and keep all of that information in one place.
While this website was seemingly small and minimal, there was a lot of thought and attention to detail that went into its assembly. Combine that with the multitude of integrations, and this project was definitely one for the books!