Our good friend (and now client) Caro is a talented artist and crafter. She constantly evolves her line of hand sewn and knitted products, and this year she approached us to help design her new brand and site. 2009 is a big one for Splityarn – she’s about to launch a book and more.

Identity: Bold and Playful

How do you create a new brand when the old brand is based on a childhood toy that the client loves?

To keep a personal approach (while creating a bold and recognizable identity), we created a silhouette of the iconic sewing machine toy and added a knitting needle to the baseline to promote her two areas of expertise. The rounded font is easy to read and playful, too.

Caro even liked out alts and went with the circle version for her store and (possible) future product logos.

Website Design: Fun and Informative

To reveal her new identity, Caro also wanted a website re-design. Originally, she just has a simple TypePad powered template that featured little customization. The new site was to be a CMS website where she could post thoughts, tutorials, showcase her products and interact with friends and clients. Our overall goal with the design was showcase a wide range of content on the home page without overwhelming a visitor.

To enable a more robust set of features, the new site is built in WordPress. (See our previous post about why we love WP.) We approached the design by utilizing a ‘magazine-style’ template called Arthemia.

This magazine style layout displays a main article with thumbnails for latest news, a small side bar with the latest product info, blurbs of the latest posts, category browsing, ad space, Social Media integration with Twitter and a widget-ready area for RSS feeds. The main Splityarn site linkes to her store, RSS feeds, info about Splityarn, and her full photo gallery from Flickr. (She’s an avid photographer.)

Store Design: Powered by Big Cartel

Splityarn uses BigCartel to power online shoping. This is our first time using BigCartel and we love it – you can create you own store, upload product photos and text, set discount codes, add sale and clearance items, manage inventory and you can customize one of their templates or design your own using their API. They help integrate with Paypal to process your order payments too.

Thanks, Caro. We can’t wait to watch your brand gain even more momentum.