As part of one of my marketing classes we had to make an ad campaign for a business. I decided to do the project on my dad’s small business. I wanted to cheer him up and let him know that I would be there to support him when he finally got his business back up and running.
Being friendly and having deep connections with his customers is really important to my dad. Not every customer experience was a positive one but he always went out of his way to try and make it a positive one. It was common for him to give leniency on late rent and make last minute changes for customers when they asked for it.
Filson Soft
Black
Regular
Arpona
Light Italic
I knew my dad’s friendly demeanor had to be something reflected in the design of the business. Friendly and approachable was something I really wanted to portray in the design to reflect the experience my dad really wanted people to have when dealing with his business. I knew I could maintain a professional with a rounded font face and balance my father’s more traditional values by pairing it with a serif- font. In addition this would work as a good contrast to each other. These fonts are both familiar feeling and yet just different enough that it doesn’t feel like it could be mistaken for something else.
The logo was a bit tricky for me. I know my dad had initially named his business to attract attention online via SEO, but it certainly made it difficult to make something relevant to both the name of the business and the business itself. After a lot of drafting, consulting my dad on how he wanted his business represented and some advice from my teacher I decided to go with a map styled look. This is in part to play into the SEO reasoning for the name and because the people unassociated with his business first associations would be online and of course use a modern phone GPS to get there.
I wanted the colors of the branding to reflect the physical space of the business itself. I wasn’t too sure of this idea at first but after picking through different shades and comparing how well they worked together I went with a four color scheme setup with red and black being the primary brand colors with Green and Tan working as highlight and accent colors.
As part of my class project I had to make digital ads and a social media presence. A big part of my dad’s business was helping people. He would help them move their stuff into their storage if they asked. He didn’t always have a lot of sales or special deals for his business, but he always offered reduced rates for auto pay. They are two things that really stuck out to me when I was designing ads for the business.
The photos in the social media pages are stock images as the physical buildings at this point didn’t exist anymore. There wasn’t always a lot happening at the business as holding other people’s stuff wasn’t always exciting but I know my dad made effort to use his social media to promote specials and announce new construction.
I’m fairly proud to say that my dad loves it. He loves the way it turned out and excited to use it when he gets his business up and running again.