November 2, 2020
Our teams have been busier than ever this month, linking up Design,
Development and Digital Marketing projects to give our clients the
best service possible. We’ve also got some exciting team news, and
some incredible entries for a global illustration challenge.
We were all sad to say goodbye to our brilliant Developer Ellie last month. She’s done such amazing work in her time at Fanatic and we’re sure she’ll continue to do so in her new role. We had a socially distanced lunch to send her off on her last day, and we’re hoping she’ll come back to see us occasionally for a drink in the Tobacco Factory bar!
In other team news, we’re excited to welcome our new Technical SEO and Support Executive Katie this month. She’ll be supporting our Development and Digital teams to deliver best in class work to our clients. Look out for her Fanatic interview in the next Scrapbook!
Over the last month we’ve been working on a brand refresh and full website design for Portico, a guest services company who pride themselves on their people. For the brand update we focused on bringing through the personality of the company and the individuals that make Portico such a unique and welcoming business.
Through getting to know Portico and the people who work there, we started to build a picture of what elements are important to the brand, and designed a website to represent that. This included creating a brighter colour palette and a new typography style to lift the brand identity and inject some fun, while still maintaining a professional feel.
Since Portico’s brand statement is ‘Great service starts with great people’, we really wanted to put the Portico people front and centre to emphasise what makes their business so special. To do this, we made use of their large library of candid staff imagery to give it a really personalised feel that stands out from their competitors.
Over the last few months, we have been rebuilding the eCommerce site for our long-term client Jack Russell Gallery. Although we haven’t changed anything drastically in the design, we refreshed the styling and rebuilt the site on WordPress with WooCommerce.
The previous site was built on Magento 1 – a powerful platform for large online stores. Although a great platform, it has come to the end of its life and is officially unsupported from June 2020.
For the new Jack Russell site, instead of upgrading to Magento 2, we opted for WordPress & WooCommerce. Renowned for their simple yet customisable CMS, it’s a perfect solution for those who want a straightforward and well functioning back-end for organising and processing sales.
The site is sleek and modern, allowing easy navigation around the different categories and mediums. Page headers incorporate large imagery to showcase the work, and WooCommerce allows for a smooth and reliable user journey when purchasing.
“The Fanatic team has always been constructive and creative to our needs and have worked with us continuously over several years now to manage, monitor and maximise one of our most important tools, our online gallery.” – JACK RUSSELL MBE
We were asked to help Aqua Restaurant Group with their digital marketing in August for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. The plan was initially to set up and manage Paid Search and Social ads for their four London locations; Aqua Shard, Kyoto, Nueva and Hutong.
Following a very successful month, Aqua continued their push to generate more customers during a difficult period of uncertainty. They extended the Eat Out to Help Out offer and introduced a number of new deals such as a Peter Pan Afternoon Tea and a Sunset Menu. With these new offerings, we saw an opportunity to improve on the results by creating a flexible WordPress site, where we could have bespoke landing pages for the different locations and deals.
The new site provides our marketing team with a flexible platform to create bespoke landing pages for different campaigns. This not only helps with the user journey, but also allows us to tailor the content to match the ad copy, improving the Ad Score and bringing the cost per conversion down.
Tom
Last month was Inktober, a 31-day drawing challenge which gives artists and designers a different prompt to tackle each day. Our Senior Designer Sam not only took up the challenge, but took it one step further by using some of his individual drawings to form one big picture with the theme ‘Under the Sea‘.
You can check out the amazing underwater scene as well as each of Sam’s illustrations at the Fanatic Instagram.
Sam, Senior Graphic Designer
