The Treasurette is a lifestyle blog focusing on Travel, Art and Kids. It is owned by Isabelle Stremme, an expat wife who travels a lot and also paints. I worked with Martine de Luna for this project, who is Isabelle’s blog coach. She guided Isabelle in pinpointing her brand voice, which I then translated into her brand identity design.
From Martine:
“Isabelle wanted to upgrade her blog into a more permanent platform that would allow her to develop her personal brand. We worked together to set some goals for her visual brand and blog content. In our sessions, I coached Isabelle as she collected inspiration for her visual brand and decided on the focus of her blog content. As a brand coach for bloggers, it’s really my job to help clients filter out what they really don’t want or bed on their blogs. After a couple of sessions of qualifying the Treasurette blog’s direction and message, we brought Pat on board to execute the blog design. At this point, Isabelle was already set on the widgets she wanted, the categories and plugins.”
I love working with Martine and her clients, because they come to me with a clear vision of what they want. Martine also knows how to communicate their ideas to me in a way that I can easily translate into visual form. We’ve worked for almost 5 years now, and our partnership is always effective!
Isabelle chose a strong and vibrant color palette of blues with an accent of bright yellow. Her Pinterest board was full of all these travel photographs and was really interesting! Martine also helps out her clients create and curate their Pinterest boards so that they effectively convey the design direction the client is going for.
For her logo, Isabelle wanted an icon that was reminiscent of a pirate’s golden doubloon, in reference to her blog title. We worked on a few design options, and a few rounds of edits before we got to the final version of the logo. Here are some options that I presented:
This is the final version that she approved. It’s modern & clean, with a handwritten font for the tagline. I wanted to infuse a watercolor texture to the logo because Isabelle is an artist. Martine also had brilliant suggestions to the icon layout.
THE BRAND BOARD
Here’s what Isabelle had to say about her direction for the blog: “I want to show a certain lifestyle: happy kids, an up-to-date mama with high interest in culture and art, travelling is even fun as a mom of 2 or three kids. I also want to give behind the scenes progress on my own painting career. I want the LOOK to be modern, clean, still special, personal, charming, catchy.”
The homepage of her blog has a full-width slider of featured posts, followed by her blog feed. I designed graphics for her categories, and these are shown on her sidebar. We patterned it after a line icon design she saw on Pinterest – very clean, minimalist, and modern.
The theme is perfectly mobile responsive, and built on the Genesis Framework. I used the Divine theme as a base theme and customized it to suit the client’s requirements.
Do check out her blog!
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