Your branding is possibly the most important aspect to get right when setting up your company. Branding isn’t just a logo, colour palette and font choice, but how your users and prospective users will experience your company; think about your company and feel about your company.

‘Your brand is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room’ – Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

Designers will try to create a brand that best represents who you are and is attractive to your potential customers. They want to design a brand that helps people recognise and remember you; creates trust; and makes people want to engage with the company to eventually purchase and use your products and/or services.

So what is a stylescape?

A stylescape helps the designer to present their brand ideas to the client. They usually include: the logo; colour palette; typography choices; maybe web design features; images; branded product ideas and anything else they feel helps present the application of the brand concept. By putting together stylescapes it gives the designer and client a chance to talk about design ideas with clarity and make sure they are all heading in the same direction.

It also means the majority of the design aspects are approved by the client before any coding and development has begun (wireframes are another tool that are also used for this reason). A recent example for us was when a company approved the design we produced, but felt it had a little too much green. We were able to quickly and easily update the stylescape to reflect how the colour change will effect the overall branding.

Not a problem, gimme 5!

Why are stylescapes useful?

At Unity Websites, we tend to start the process by investigating into your competitors. This helps us get some background information about the industry you are in and see what your competition is up to.  We then work with you to discover what your brand means to you and create a brand that resonates with your company goals, customers, industry and community. User Experience (UX) design techniques are used to identify the wants and needs of your users and a stylescape gives us a way to convey this early on.

Our research guides our design process leading up to us usually presenting clients with multiple stylescape’s. We find the comparison can help give perspective and can sometimes potentially offer up an brand idea that a client may not have initially thought about, but likes now they’ve seen it executed.

Stylescapes can be hugely time saving!

It is always going to be quicker and easier to adapt a stylescape than the fully designed web page – it blows our mind any designer would go that far into a project without client approval!

Another great recent example of this was for The Vaping Hamster website. We were initially approached with a logo and asked for something “a cut above the rest”. We would never shy from such a request, but with that being such a subjective specific we needed to test the water on how far the client wanted to go.

Our first proposals were two quite different designs:

They were really ready to push the boat out, but were a little scared of appearing too girly and alienating male customers or those easily offended by a lot of pink.

A few tweaks later and we were able to show some alternative colour palettes.

Do they really help a website design, why not just design the page?

If you approached a printers for a business card or a sign makers for a new shop fascia the chances are they are not interested in doing you a stylescape. They will either ask you to supply the artwork or maybe charge a minimal fee to design the exact product you need. With a website being such a huge undertaking, which is basically your virtual sign, shop, business card, brochure, etc. rolled into one, it becomes more necessary to think about the finer details and look to set a consistency across your brand.

Once you have a stylescape it can be kept and shown to any future designers for them to get the fundamentals and then anything can be created off of the back of it and be kept on-brand.

Likewise for us, once the stylescape is created, we combine this with a wireframe to generate a website that should only need minor edits and tweaks to be finished.

By Hannah Kolka

Hannah is Head UX Designer at Unity Websites. She rocks a Masters in Psychology and is a fanatical people watcher, painter and box series aficionado. 

By Hannah Kolka

Hannah is Head UX Designer at Unity Websites. She rocks a Masters in Psychology and is a fanatical people watcher, painter and box series aficionado.