Hair Salon Web + Logo Design
Design and develop a responsive website, brand identity, and social media presence.
Project Brief
Eric’s Salon is a barber shop that is located in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz, CA. The salon has been serving its community for 15 years. Eric—the owner of the shop wants to expand his business in order to reach more customers in other areas. As he is self-employed, he is mostly doing everything by himself from financing to managing appointments.
Eric couldn’t manage everything by himself because his client base is growing. Therefore, he wants to hire more hairstylists to share the work as well as to promote his professional services to the community. He realized that an online website could do many things to promote the shop from conveying the shop’s identity to bringing more clients into the shop.
Project Overview
Platform
Responsive Website
Role
Designer & Content Strategist
Tools
WordPress, Adobe Creative Suite, HTML, CSS
The Challenges
Eric does not have any online presence at all. He needed a complete online presence built from scratch. Despite the truth that there are many hair salon websites in the market, my problem was to create a professional-looking website that shows Eric’s style and what services are provided. Eric also wanted to include booking and paying for services on his new website. These functions will help eliminate busy work and make booking clients easier. In addition, he wanted a new logo for his shop, so he can use it for brochures and marketing purposes.
Talking with stakeholders
After the kickoff meeting to learn more about his business’ goals and needs. I understand that Eric wants a responsive, professional looking website with all features working correctly, so that his clients will be able to book and pay for services online. The new website has to have a professional looking, easy to use and functioning properly. Eric also wants a professional logo for the shop, so he can use it for brochures and marketing purposes.
Sitemap
I created the sitemap for the website to organize the pages and help my client visualize the structure of his future website.
Concept Sketches
After several meetings to talk about concepts and get his approval for the sitemap, I came up with the concept for the 3 main pages.
I applied the minimalist design to focus on the content while giving a professional and clean impression to visitors.
Let's take a look at the final website
Below is the screenshot of the homepage which included salon hours, brief summary about the shop, links to the services, social media presence, testimonials and contact information. Booking buttons are placed around the page for easy access to the booking system.
The website is responsive to every device from web to mobile.
Additional Work
- I helped Eric purchase domain name "erics-salon.com" and hosting from BlueHost.
- I installed an online booking plugin from WordPress and set up for automatic SMS from Plivo.
- I set up and maintain the social media presence for Eric's Salon (Facebook, Instagram, Yelp).
Logo Design
Thumbnails
Eric wanted to add an elegant style and a welcoming feeling to the logo. Understanding his wishes, I drew some thumbnails to help myself with ideas inspired by salon’s related images/objects.
Concept Sketches
I finalized with ideas and minimized my designs inspired by salon’s objects such as comb, scissors, hair dryer and clippers.
Logo Development
I used Adobe Illustrator to design 3 types of logo: Image logo, Type logo, and Combo/Gestal Logo.
Once I came up with the final designs, I made sure all of my designs satisfied 5 rules:
- Logo should reflect the company in a unique and honest way.
- Logo should work well in black and white (one-color printing)
- Logo should be artistically balanced.
- Avoid too much detail.
- Make sure the logo's scalable.
Final Deliverables
- Website: erics-salon.com
- Logos
Lesson Learned
From this project, I learned to communicate with the client effectively to understand the client’s needs, goals, and business requirements while managing their impact on project delivery.
Grantt Chart is a very helpful tool to keep track of my progress which I can share with Eric, so that we are alway on the same page.
I learned that the WordPress plugin for the booking system and the Plivo SMS method does not really work for the shop as they are super complicated and require a lot of effort.
As a result, I spoke to Eric and suggested to him to use Square booking system as he already had an account with them.
Their booking system is more accurate and secure. They also support him with automatic SMS and emails.
Eric was very happy with my work and referred me to one of his clients for another project.
