AgencyBox


Services: Brand Strategy, Brand Naming, Logo Design, Website Design, Report design, Email Marketing setup


The scary, exciting thing about entrepreneurship is that business is always changing and evolving. When you’re first getting things up and running, you might have a general idea of the services you want to offer and the clients you want to work with, but as you gain experience in your industry you begin to refine your offerings, your processes, and your brand.

It’s always a treat to work with entrepreneurs who’ve spent a few years in business; they have a better idea of the clients they’re trying to appeal to, the items they need to have designed, and the overall visual identity they’re trying to achieve through their brand and website.

So when John Tsalikis approached me for his brand and design work, I was thrilled. And in addition to his logo and website, I worked with him to come up with the ‘AgencyBox’ name, a brand strategy and also set up?an email capture process. This included a PDF white paper report design as a free content download.

His new?SaaS startup aims to help large organisations reduce agency spend through better recruitment agency management.

The working title was ?PSL Manager? so we first needed a new brand name and clear strategy before we could start any design.

?Andy is good at finding the right balance between creativity and being strategic ? and our new name, ?AgencyBox? says it all! It fits our business perfectly and helped us position ourselves clearly in this competitive market ? and our sales team are better equipped with the brand designs they have created.?

John Tsalikis – CEO AgencyBox

Defining a brand strategy and name

We spent a couple of days of workshop?together to define his positioning and fleshed out a brand strategy.

The workshops help?clients by taking them away from their day to day business and get them to work on their business.

On the brand naming workshop, we eventually came up with a strong brand name that fitted well – and was available to purchase as a .com domain.

The fresh, innovative, revolutionary and knowledgeable brand name was born:?AgencyBox.com.

Logo design

Now it was time we started work on creating his brand logo identity. It needed to be consistent, scalable to different sizes and work across all mediums for print and screen.

I start with an inspiration board, gathering images and pairing colours to create a “feel” and an aesthetic to work from throughout the entire project.

John did a great job pulling images together in a secret Pinterest board, and the colour palette of the photos and design inspirations blended in perfectly with some of the adjectives from our strategy sessions, ?confident?, ?fresh?, ?innovative?, ?revolutionary? and ?knowledgeable?

I kept all of those qualities in mind as I moved onto the next step: sketching logo concepts.

You can see how the inspiration board help focus ideas?within my sketches; I worked on the?square or box shape and the letter shapes. I drafted up a number of variations that focused on simplicity and ease of use of the software.

After digitising the concepts and presenting John with a few distinct logo options, he chose the one below.

There are many variables to consider when designing a logo, but versatility is one of the key things I focus on. The box icon can be used on its own or rearranged into alternative logos to give him more versatility.

These other logo lock-ups are often a better fit for things like email signatures, websites or page footers, etc.

I chose a classic san-serif, humanist font called, ?Keep Calm? which lends itself to a more corporate yet modern look (It?s the same font used in those ?Keep Calm and Carry On? posters from the 1940?s). I tweaked the individual letters – re-creating a new lower-case ?g? and evened out the spacing.

agencybox-logo-guidelines-2016-4

But a brand is much more than just a logo. It really starts to come to life when elements like borders, text, and colours enter the mix during the second stage design phase.

For AgencyBox, I designed a set of unique icons, business cards, corporate stationery, PowerPoint templates, and an A4 report.

Corporate Website Design

After the branded collateral items were complete, I spent the final stage of our 3-week schedule designing John’s new website. I used consistent fonts and colours, kept the navigation simple, and chose a minimal layout to encorage users to click through and take action.

The site had three main goals:

  1. To promote a professional, yet innovative corporate design that enhanced their sales process.
  2. To make it easy to book a demo.
  3. To build authority and collect emails through offering a free to download industry report on the recruitment management sector.

The result?

The new brand designs and website has given the sales team confidence to promote AgencyBox ? so that in the first two months since launch they secured three new meetings with large corporate clients.

?I believe if it wasn?t for our new brand and website design, large organisations wouldn?t have even considering meeting us. I?d use them again, and unflinchingly recommend Andy at Designbull to other growing businesses who need to build credibility and show expertise.?

John Tsalikis – CEO AgencyBox

The images above don’t quite do it justice. Click here to visit the new website for AgencyBox and try out the savings calculator we created!.

John was a great client and I’m honoured that he trusted me to help visualise his new brand and website.

I’m thrilled to add this project to the Designbull?portfolio!