New Karpi Studio Visual Direction

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• Say hello to our new logo!

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Why?

As a whole experience, the old version of karpi.studio although beautiful fell short in offering a warm welcome. The change of visual direction was brought about too by an urgency to re-align to our client market of enviro-tech and clean tech scale ups, to ensure the website fully represented our mission and work standards.

The old website suffered from a few key issues:

• An overly masculine/aggressive design that felt efficient, bold and unforgiving.
• No warm feeling whilst viewing the site as a user, unwelcoming.
• Stock photography.
• Layout inconsistencies between pages.
• A lack of clear branding.
• Varying visual styles between website projects created for clients = no cohesive feel for our work as a whole and no unified and marketable studio style.

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How?

First up we started with some deep competitor research and Google Analytics insights, this allows us to see where we’re at right now, the current problems and fall offs in traffic and how we could be performing better both visually and figures wise.

Following this was the creation of the structure for the new homepage. This allowed us to ensure it has all the necessary information and features and to organise it in the cleanest way possible.

We knew from the outset that we wanted a crisp and minimalistic look with a small amount of colour and the other colour coming from great, high quality imagery and video used in the design. The most suitable colour for anything related to the environment is green, it is known world wide, instills positive vibes and a sense of correctness. Using black as section backgrounds felt too harsh so we created a dark green to act as the primary colour, followed by a more desaturated and lighter version of this to compliment it with the majority of the space being occupied by white. Large spacing was used for an elegant touch.

The logo was simplified and stripped back to be a solid KS in an artistic form and solid in colour to be as memorable and versatile as possible across different marketing materials, here we created a pride version of it 😊 due to its thick shape it can be used for different events, flags and colourings.

An overarching issue with the existing site was inconsistencies between the website projects created visual direction, no two followed the same style meaning that we couldn’t build upon this and have a ‘style’ we are known for as a studio.  To correct this we first had to decide upon a new direction entirely, one that fulfilled our values and worked well with our target market of enviro-tech scale ups, so we landed on a very clean and Scandinavian style of design. Typically using pastel colours, plenty of white space, lines, grid layouts, asymmetry and contrasting font sizes and weights. We then started to take existing and new hero sections of websites and rebuild them in a new style.

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An example of an older Karpi Studio website:

The same website, reimagined in our new Studio style:

Another example of Kyoto:

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In conclusion the work we produce moving forwards will aim to always put the users first. Ultimately your website is a sales tool and it should have an optimum user experience to ensure that it’s enjoyable and also ensures the visitor takes action.

It will also be visually minimalistic, animated and beautiful.

We create websites you can be proud of that get you results.

Catch you soon!

The Karpi Studio Team 🕺🏽

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