Valley House branding & web design and build

Client: Valley House
Branding & web design and build

A new brand and a new website for Valley House

Valley House got in touch with Morse-Brown Design after seeing a number of our designs in print, including the work we have done for the Methodist Church. A new Communications Chief had been appointed, and they needed to modernise both their brand and their website.

Beginning with face-to-face meetings (we always like to see our clients if at all possible – there is so much more information that can be conveyed in a meeting than you can derive from a document), we then researched the organisation to work out a succinct phrase that would accurately describe both their vision and mission. And this is what we came up with:

Valley House Vision: Helping people deal confidently with the challenges life brings.

Valley House Mission: Supporting people to face their challenges, take control of their lives, and create a future of hope and potential for themselves.

From this, we came up with a number of keywords, around which to base our branding design work. The overarching keyword was empowering, or opening doors of opportunity. Others we came up with were: independence, control over their own lives, confidence and enabling. It’s only when we have a range of keywords like this, that accurately describe the organisation we’re working with that we can start work on actual brand designs.

Having initially presented 10 designs to the client (we always do a minimum of 3), the chosen design was selected and tweaked. In our design presentation document, we described it as ‘A bold and contemporary logo with a clear, strong footprint, using a simple upwards-pointing arrow icon to represent progression, moving forward and improving the quality of life of the people with whom you work. It also echoes the shape of a roof of a house – this positive symbolism can mean both an organisation with many services brought together under one roof, but also a place that provides the security and sanctuary of a home. The simplicity of the logo also lends itself to the potential of different usages. The logo could be created to include a set of arrows to represent the four areas in which you’ve grouped your services. The identity could also include a set of sub-brands for each service using a complementary palette of colours.’

As you can see from the images above, we went on to create a set of sub-brands for each service.

Following the branding exercise, we went on to design and build their website at valleyhouse.org.uk. This is a fully responsive, parallax site, that works perfectly on screens of any and every size. It has an events diary, jobs section, contact forms, and a special ‘Exit this site safely’ button so that at-risk users of the website can quickly leave the page they are on if they need to.

The site is hosted on a platform that allows for incredibly fast page-load times, as well as top-end WordPress security. Combining both hosting and security in one package has allowed us to offer our clients a more cost-effective way of managing both of these key elements.

If you have a branding or website design project you need to get off the ground, contact us for more information.