The vast majority of our work is carried out for b2b service providers, serious businesses headquartered in offices wanting that clean, contemporary and professional look. We’ve become experts in providing that brand image with an individual twist but every so often we get a unique project, one where the client is not based in an office but more importantly not selling to another business. It’s a challenging project but a creative one, like branding SugarCreamCakes.
Sugar Cream Cakes is an online bakery specialising in beautiful eggless cakes. It had run successfully with an amateur brand image in a pre-startup phase but now business was building and a professional rebrand was needed.
Design strategy:
SugarCreamCakes specilaises in eggless cakes which is a huge selling point for vegetarians. It’s a rarity to find someone who can make them and even more difficult to find someone who can make them pretty and tasty.
When you’re selling to the masses though, an eggless cake may not be at the top of everyones list. An eggless cake is a personal preference and actually had no effect whatsoever on the end taste because the cakes all tasted good. What was important was the look of the cakes. Design Sells and that’s what the brand imagery had to do, sell the creative side of the eggless cakes so there’s actually no distinction between an egg or eggless cake.
Being a very creative person herself, the owner had good ideas for the starting point of the design.
Filligree, vivid colour and a certain original quirkiness was a part of the design brief, along with a script font and definitely no blocked fonts. We however transformed that brief into something that would be iconic and would sell.
We designed five logos, each with unique style and character enforcing a way that Sugar Cream Cakes could be marketed. By the end of the design concepts and amendments it turned out that the best logo was not the one which was closest to the brief, it was one which strayed.
Through our own intuition and experience we created a logo that toned down the brief and in some cases went against it to provide our own take of what the logo should be. It was a gamble and a dare on our part but ended up being the final chosen logo by the owner herself.
We then went ahead to create a web design to represent the brand online. In doing so we extended the identity to create one of the most complex visual web designs we’ve ever done on the web.
We know how to graphic design for websites and this was really pushing the two disciplines to the edge.
Using CSS 2.0 & 3.0 techniques, we incorporated, web based transprancy, drop shadows and multiple repeating patterns to create a glorious bakery website developed onto a CMS that functioned.
After all that we even went ahead and edited and colour corrected 100+ photos of the cakes for the gallery.
The end result was something which was very well not a b2b service provider, it was something which did not look like a typical bakery but a unique cake maker, helping the business to set its own niche as a retail supplier.
It looks expensive but the colours make it a warm and friendly brand image, one that’s welcoming, unique and stylish.
That’s how we branded an online bakery.
