Confidence Building & Business Streamlining with Authentic Brand & Web Design
Carolyn Egan’s Holistic Academic Development is an educational consulting business run by Carolyn Egan. She is a multi-faceted service provider that focuses on helping students find joy and sustainability in their educational journeys. She offers K-12 private school placement services, college admissions support, grad school admissions support and career development curriculum design services to students, parents and schools. She believes that a meaningful education is the key to flourishing in life and she is on a mission to help all her students find fulfillment through their education.
The Mission
Holistic Academic Development is an educational consulting firm that assists in helping students create a better future for themselves. She enhances the lives of her clients by crafting unique client experiences for each student or parent that she interacts with. My goal at The Arcoíris Design Co was to highlight the specialized approach Carolyn takes with all her clients and highlight that through thoughtful and authentic visual web presence.
The Outcome
Carolyn’s visual identity was built from the ground up and designed in a way that told the depth of Carolyn’s approach to educational consulting. I created a unique branding suite that is down-to-earth and playful, while also remaining high-end and sophisticated. The goal was for the branding to remain authentic to Carolyn, but also be far removed and different from what is considered the norm in the education space. Once we solidified the branding, I created a website that educates Carolyn’s clients about her business and converts them into paying customers.
The Impact
Since the launch of her website, Carolyn has been more confident as a leader in her industry. She has an easier time booking clients as well because she can direct them to her website to learn about her core offerings and approach to educational consulting.
Services
Brand Strategy
Visual Brand Design
Squarespace Web Design
Community Connection
I first met Carolyn in 2017 at my local yoga studio, where I was working at the time. She randomly came into the studio and reconnected with my boss, with who she went to high school in Virginia Beach over 20 years prior. It was a random coincidence and it felt like the universe conspired with Carolyn to bring her into the studio that fateful weekday. While catching up with my boss, Carolyn brought up that she was looking to start her own business and build an eCommerce platform online. That’s when my boss mentioned that I was a web designer, and, with that, Carolyn and I have been connected ever since.
Since I first met Carolyn she has always worked in educational consulting as her main form of income. That being said, we originally started working together on a completely different project, which is currently on pause. When we first connected Carolyn was under the impression that her educational consulting work would come to an end once her eCommerce business launched into the world.
Over the course of time though it’s become apparent to her that she will always have education clients, whether she has a new business venture or not.
Carolyn’s business has been steadily growing over time, especially as the education system continues to shift with each passing year. After a few years into our friendship, Carolyn realized that she needed to create a more solid foundation for her educational consulting business to flourish more sustainably. It was after this revelation that she decided to reach out to me about building out a brand and website for The Holistic Academic Development.
What I have always loved about working with Carolyn is her faith in me and my creative process. She knows the depth and detail I put into all of my projects and is fully trusting of my abilities to produce compelling branding and web design work. For this reason, Carolyn has been one of the easiest clients I’ve ever worked with.
Brand Strategy
One of the challenges for me when working on Carolyn’s branding was ensuring that her brand was both professional and polished, yet not boring at the same time. Education businesses can be outdated and stuffy, which is highly apparent when looking at competitors in Carolyn’s industry. My approach to this challenge was to treat Carolyn’s brand as a personal brand. The business does not exist without Carolyn herself, so her personality needs to be front and center in the branding.
On a granular level, this meant using soft, muted colors in her color palette, which she tends to wear on a day-to-day basis. It also meant going for a softer and more approachable branding style than what you would see in academia. I also incorporated brand imagery that showcased her home of San Diego, adding to the relaxing and approachable vibes we were cultivating for her brand presence.
Sacred Pause
Something unique I did for Carolyn that I don’t normally do with clients is I met up with her weekly throughout a large portion of this project. She lives in my local area, and these meetings gave me an opportunity to dive deeper into her practices, attitudes, and thoughts about her business. They helped me see the depth of the work we were cultivating together and helped expand my thought process toward her project as a whole. Because of these meetings, I didn’t take a traditional sacred pause as I do in other projects while working with Carolyn. I was so creatively inspired by our weekly conversations and the work she was doing that I was eager, excited, and motivated to build out her project.
Brand Design
When Carolyn and I initially started working on this project together, I thought I was going to take a more high-end and collegiate approach to her brand design. After a few of our weekly conversations together, along with the research for her brand strategy, it became clear that this was not the right design style for her brand. I was looking to create something much more approachable and relatable for her clients. It was with this thought in mind that I searched for a new direction.
I knew from the very beginning that Carolyn’s brand colors would be taking a beachy style. She lives in San Diego and made it clear that she wanted that showcased in the brand. With that in mind, I found imagery and colors that reflected a relaxed beach vibe, pulling on bright teals, yellows and oranges to create an inviting and happy color palette to reflect Carolyn’s caring personality.
With these themes in mind, I then started to look for font options. I was looking for a font that was both professional and welcoming at the same time. I wanted something that represented education well, but wasn’t stuffy or difficult to connect with. I ended up finding a font called Heritage on Creative Market that hit all those marks for me. It looks like the cursive you probably learned as a child in school, which draws in those educational associations. It also has soft lines making it more feminine and soft. I was also pleased that it is a super legible script font, meaning we wouldn’t have any issues with people not being able to read Carolyn’s business name if we used it for her logo. It was a perfect fit, and with that, I started on her logo design.
Once I found the font to use for Carolyn’s branding suite, the brand itself came together super quickly. I was creatively inspired and quickly was able to put together a logo, alternate logo, and two submarks with relative ease. Carolyn loved the direction I took and we were fortunate that the brand came together in under a month. We were really excited to keep this momentum going but then ended up hitting a roadblock in the project.
At the same time that I was working on Carolyn’s branding, I was also going through a major rebrand in my own business. I was working through my own process, and sharing the details of what I was going through along the way. Everything was going relatively smoothly until I connected with a lawyer who threw a wrench into my rebrand plans.
It was through my lawyer that I found out that the business name I had used for my brand was not trademarkable. It was too common of a business name, and there were too many brands in my same industry using a variation of my old business name. It was a difficult moment in my rebrand process and I shared my anxieties about this and what I was going through with my audience. It was through this experience that Carolyn decided to check on her if her own business name was trademarkable, and we discovered that it was not.
Carolyn started her branding project with me using the name Building Brighter Futures for her business. After consulting with her lawyer, she found out that this name was not one she could trademark for exclusive use. She decided to change the name of her business and eventually settled on Carolyn Egan’s Holistic Academic Development. Then it was up to me to salvage the branding we had already completed and make it work with the new business name.
Luckily for us, my branding process is extremely thorough and rooted in a lot of strategy. Because of this, I was able to take the same core components that I used in her original branding, and readapt it with the new business name. Her branding suite ended up being similar to what we had already put together with the old business name, but I was able to update it and style it in a unique and visually interesting way that played off the key visual features from the new name.
Caronlyn Egan’s Holistic Academic Development Showcase
The Results
Carolyn loved the direction I decided to take for her branding project. She really appreciated the detail I put into her branding and how I was able to encapsulate her into a stunning visual style. She was also overjoyed that when we had to pivot her business name it does not have any major effects on the stylistic direction for her branding as a whole. With this branding in place, we were able to move forward with her website design and start carving out a space for her to market her business on the web.
Website Strategy
It was clear from the very beginning that Carolyn would most benefit from having a website on Squarespace. I used her Website Strategy Presentation as an opportunity to dive into the features and details we would build-out on the platform, as well as starting to translate her branding into a visual direction for the website. I put together a clear outline of website goals, user profiles, inspiration sites and styleboards as well. Overall, the website strategy phase added onto the depth we developed during the brand strategy phase of the project.
I was looking to encapsulate the same characteristics we incorporated into her brand in Carolyn’s website styleboards. For this reason I focused on creating a layout style that was inviting, easy to navigate and approachable. I focused on using pops of her soft color palette paired lines and a grid out for easy browsing. My goal was to ensure that her website and all the detail it was going to house was easy to navigate and lead users to her desired goal—having them reach out about her services.
Front End Design
The thing that really brought Carolyn’s website together was a brand photoshoot that she planned with my favorite photographer, Katie from The Caia Collective. I worked with Carolyn and Katie to ensure that the style of the photoshoot Carolyn had matched up with the look and feel we were looking to portray on her website. We focused on setting up Carolyn in beautiful portrait shots that reflected her sunny personality and her depth of character. We incorporated props such as books and her computer to showcase the tools she uses to actually perform her services. We even took some themed shots where Carolyn was teaching a student (played by me!) These images, paired with some beautifully curated stock photography and Carolyn’s gorgeous branding created a strong foundation for us to build the visual aesthetic for her website. From there, it was just a matter of creating thoughtful user journeys to ensure Carolyn’s clients ended up at the right places on her website.
Blog & Case Study Management
Carolyn has so much to say about so many different topics concerning the education industry. Our conversations about her project would drag on for hours, keeping us absorbed as she dived into intricate details about a variety of different subjects relating to her field. For this reason, I wanted to build out Carolyn a blog. This would allow her to share about the topics she was speaking to me about—except now she could share about these topics to her clients as well.
On top of this, Carolyn expressed to me how much time she had to spend describing her services to her potential clients. She mentioned that getting clients to book her to work with their children was an arduous task for her, one that she didn’t mind, but she knew could be easier. It was with this information in mind that I decided to build a case study hub for Carolyn to share her experiences with past clients. This would allow potential clients to see the nuances of her work, the level of detail that she brings to each client, and the breadth of her knowledge about the education industry. Both the case study hub and the blog are now a sales and marketing tool Carolyn can use to get more clients.
The Results
Carolyn absolutely loves her website so far. She is overjoyed that it is going to simplify her sales process and help her during the process of gathering clients. She is looking forward to continuing to expand her site and build off what we initially put together during our project together. She’s especially excited by how easy the site is to manage on her own, empowering her to shift and update the site over time!
“If you ever have the chance to work with Alex, I highly recommend it! Even if she cannot work with you right away, she is worth the wait! Despite the fact that her schedule might be packed, she will make time to get your website exactly how you want it! She is not only extremely skilled at branding and website design— Alex also inspires you to look at your business from many different perspectives. She is the outside opinion you WANT and NEED. Alex takes the time to dive into your intentions and examine the intricacies of target audience demands— and then communicate them to you in the simplest language. She is aware of internet users’ thought patterns and preferences. Alex truly understands how compositional aesthetics affect how people perceive your brand: she employs color psychology with such mastery that she produces true art therapy. Your audience will want to go back to your site JUST TO LOOK AT IT AGAIN. Because if Alex works on your website, it will be your dream site. Don’t know what your dream site looks like? Don’t worry, because Alex does! Alex = Full-time Digital Wizard. Plus, Alex is always learning the newest skills and applications. She is constantly evolving as a digital designer, so your stuff will not look LIKE ANYONE ELSE’S! When it comes to the business side of things, Alex has you covered there, too. She can turn you on to resources that will help you understand the importance of building contact networks and trademarking. I consider myself lucky to have met Alex, and I’m sure you will, too. ”
