Figmints, a Providence RI Branding and Design Company

Crafting a memorable brand is no longer optional; it’s a necessity if you want your business to successfully rise above the rest. Contact Us

Your brand communicates your values, offering, promise, experience, and culture to your prospective customers in neat and tidy package.

A brand isn’t a logo, or product packaging, or an advertisement. It’s not your company culture, or how you’re impacting the world, or your unique story. A brand is all of those things combined.

Branding persuades customers to pay a premium for your product or service, helps them navigate the marketplace towards a made selection, and broadcasts the good news of your business to your audience far and wide.

Rebranding your company can boost your reputation, further motivate employees, and attract new customers. While undertaking a rebrand for your company can seem intimidating, it also provides the opportunity to reflect on your growth and progress to date. It will mean changing the outward facing identity of who you are and even the way you describe what you do.

We’re based in Providence, Rhode Island but we have helped organizations around the country and globe to create an impressive presence online.

What we do:

1

Identity Analysis

2

Naming

3

Ideation & Sketching

4

Logo

5

Brand System

6

Website Design

7

App Design

8

User Interface Design (UI)

Strategy & Discovery

We’ll kick things off with a questionnaire and a few interviews to better understand your company, your target audience, your functionality requirements and, most importantly, your competition. During this time we will examine your competitors and analyze what is working (and not working) for them. Most importantly, we’ll review how your current brand and offering stacks up against everyone else.

When it comes to apps and websites, we will take a deep dive into your analytics and look at everything from demographics to device type. If you do not already have heat mapping and click tracking on your site, we will add this additional layer of analytics. This will ensure that we understand how your users interact with your site before we build a new one. The new site (or re-designed site) should help you grow online. Here are some of the activities that take place in the strategy and discovery phase.

  • Meet with you for a strategy consultation where we talk about project goals and your vision for the future. Each project is different and defining the goals will help us make decisions along the way.
  • Research competitors (yes, you have them). We will look at what is working best for them and what we can improve on.
  • Map the inspiration for your website on mood boards. Review special requirements and explore design elements. We will work with you to decide on a look and feel that matches your brand and visitors expectations.
  • Define your distinctive look and feel by finding your brand’s core themes and positioning approach. This will help when we architect your site in the next

Ideation & Sketch Process

We take the themes we identified during the discovery phase and materialize them into sketch concepts. We leave no stone unturned in our sketch sessions, where members from across our agency convene to tell your story visually. You’ll be included each step of the way as we explore different directions for your custom logo and branding. Expect us to do these kinds of activities:

  • Sketch and bounce ideas off one another to leverage an entire studio’s worth of creative energy
  • Brainstorm taglines to communicate your message
  • Create a system of typefaces to spell out your story
  • Develop color palettes
  • Pull all of the themes from the consultation session forward, paying close attention to the messages and brand position that will set you apart from the crowd

Information Architecture and UI/UX Design

This is where things get real – it is one of our favorite parts of the process because our ideas quickly start to come to fruition. Ideas from our discovery phase are transferred into the foundation of your new website and we make your brand story come to life, with appropriate aesthetics and styling. The Figmints team will consider structure and usability as we:

  • Map out the navigation and user flows in a sitemap. The sitemap is the blueprint for all the pages on your website. It will help us understand user needs and organize content logically.
  • Define functionality and content using custom page layouts for desktop, mobile, and tablet views. Users on different devices have different goals. We will look at each device type to ensure functionality matches the users goals.
  • Style tiles to explore visual options and mood. This is where we define things like typefaces and button styles. They will work together to create a visual voice for your brand online.
  • Polished, custom designs for specific modules or complete responsive layouts for tailored mobile experiences. The design elements come together to create custom modules and page designs for your site.

Brand Digitization

Get excited. The next step in the process is when your brand (which is by the way, destined to be the next big thing) enters the digital marketing age. While we digitize your brand, expect to see these things happening:

  • Create pixel-perfect logos
  • Narrow previous explorations of type and color
  • Build out final logo options ripe for their big debut
  • Format design collateral and a proof of concept (be sure to request this option to continue to expand your new identity)

Brand Delivery

After adding content to make the site your own, the big day arrives!

  • Set up, secure, and performance tune the production server (encrypted with SSL).
  • Before we launch we test site speed and code integrity. This means minimizing requests, automatically compressing images, and ensuring everything is running smoothly.
  • Migrate site from staging to production server. This is the actual act of “pushing” your website live.
  • We will train your entire team on how to manage and update the website. This training session can also be recorded so you can watch it again or train new members of your organization.
  • Set off fireworks in our parking lot to celebrate your new amazing site.

Our process is built to help take a complex branding project and distill it to a standardized roadmap. Our goal is to keep things as simple as possible for you, the client. It is our goal to be sure that everything is communicated clearly as we go through the branding process – your input & insight into your business is important in creating a brand that is true to its roots.

 

UI/UX

Every site and app that we build stems from great UX and UI design. So what is UI/UX? UI refers to the User Interface. The user interface is the actual look & feel of what you’re viewing. Its’ the type, the colors and the graphics of a site. It’s the proper roundedness of the button, that you know you want to click. UX refers to the User Experience.When designing with the user in mind, the design approach is centered more around how the user will interact with the site and easily find what you’re looking for. it’s where that button goes, and how it interacts with the user. One thing is central – the user. In our UI/UX process, we take deep consideration into the users themselves, and the goals that we are after. It might not always be encouraging them to purchase, but perhaps we want to create a seamless experience to create more referrals. The process can take the experience outside their own screen to multiple devices, or even interacting with the world around them. Proper testing through experiments that we can create quickly, and get dynamic feedback is paramount. Check out some great examples of our UI/UX process in these case studies:

 

 

Why Rhode Island?

Based in Providence, Rhode Island we came for the food and stayed for the people. The “Creative Capital” has some of the best arts in the Northeast. The location is perfect to serve clients from New York to Boston – but with a more affordable real estate marketing, you will get Madison Avenue quality for a fraction of the price. Rhode Island also boasts some of the most talented digital creators. It’s a hotspot for designers, developers, copywriters, and marketers. We’re proud to call Little Rhody home.

The internet is growing, are you?

It’s time for your organization to step up your digital game.

We’re here to help your new site act as the hub for all online activities. Contact us today to get a quote for a custom designed and developed website.

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