Designing the Craftsmen Identity and their website

Today sees the launch of French based Digital Agency ‘Craftsmen’. I was ask to create the brand identity for Craftsmen and design their website. I worked with Aaron Thomas from Mixd who was on coding duties.

I thought it would be a nice way to launch the new brand and website with an insight into my thinking behind the project.

Logo & Brand Identity

The inspiration behind the logo design and the visual identity to the site came directly from the name ‘Craftsmen’ and what they do, which is design and build web applications. I wanted to combine the idea of craftsmanship and the digital world.

For the logo, I kept it simple, with clean lines and an emphasise on ‘craftsmanship’. Based upon a combination of typefaces (Intro & Gotham Bold) I heavily customised the ‘R’ to mimic the blade of a wood plane. I then edited part of the letter ‘M’ to further emphasise that the logo itself had been crafted.

Craftsmen logo

To expand upon the logo design and create the brand identity my inspiration was ‘digital’. I wanted to create a set of imagery for the website that was simple, bold and was ‘digital’ in style. The solution came in super simple pixels illustrations inspired by the likes of Susan Kare, the creator of the classic Mac icons.

The result is a collection of images that that hark back to the early days of digital graphics. They’re designed to support the content of the website and create the visual identity for the Craftsmen brand.

The Website

With the Craftsmen logo and identity in place, I used this to design the content into what is hopefully and interesting and fun visual experience. I worked with Aaron Thomas from Mixd to create a responsive web experience that works as well on mobile devices as it does on the desktop.

It was an extremely creative and rewarding project to work and I’m thankful that Mehdi and Kevin asked me to work on it with them.

Thanks guys!