Written by There may be nothing more difficult than taking your own medicine. Here at Mind Vault we help clients every day to design and redesign their websites, but when it came down to redesigning our own, we learned very quickly that playing devil’s advocate to our own design inspiration was far more challenging than any of us had initially thought.
The primary issue that we ran into was choice overload. As a design firm that helps others to make design decisions every day we had somehow lost the ability to make our own, initially anyway. Much time was spent staring blankly at long lists of far too many options. So, when we finally did make some concrete choices, we were so excited about them that we agreed to document the entire project and release it as the first post across our very own, newly redesigned website.
And so, here we are. Hopefully you love a great website redesign story as much as we do. And of course, no great website redesign story would be complete with a logo redesign behind it, now would it? Of course not. So we decided to take the plunge, as we have advised so many of our clients to do in the past, and re-brand ourselves at the same time.
Here’s how it all started.
Below is what our original, founding logo looked like before the redesign began in January of 2019 (this original design was created circa 2004, and had been used since that time):
I know. Incredibly sexy isn’t it? Well, at least a few people may have thought so around 2004, but I think we can confidently say that design times have changed since then. Significantly. So, with this in mind, this was our 1st serious logo redesign consideration:
And we said, YES! That’s it! Until we stared at it for awhile. After which time we realized that it was really LOUD. And perhaps even somewhat aggressive with that whole target / bullseye implication, even though our only intended targets were the problems that our solutions were designed to solve. No … we said. This is definitely NOT it. And so we moved on to our 2nd serious logo redesign consideration:
And we said, YES! That’s it! Until we stared at it for awhile. After which time we realized that we had agreed from the very beginning (everyone pinky swore actually) that we would NEVER again use the color GREY in a logo design. EVER. And here we were. Breaking this rule yet again in order to gain some amount of literal satisfaction from the fact that the word “Mind” does in fact exist within our company name, but that it need not be so literally represented by the grey matter of the brain. No … we said. This is definitely NOT it. And so we moved on to our 3rd serious logo redesign consideration:
And we said, YES! That’s DEFINITELY it! Until we stared at it for awhile. After which time we realized that while it was beautiful, it was somewhat cartooney looking, and after awhile we weren’t really sure how it said “solution” in any meaningful way whatsoever. It certainly said “design” in every way imaginable, but design was not our primary deliverable, solutions were. We therefore needed a logo that reflected that, while still showcasing our heavy emphasis on design. So no … we said one last time. This is definitely NOT it. Which brought us, thankfully, to our 4th and FINAL logo redesign consideration:
This time, we didn’t say anything. We just stared at it for what seemed like an eternity. Waiting for those negative critiques to jump out and slash the design to pieces just as they had done so many times before. But … nothing. Just an eerie silence. Until everyone began looking at one another as if to say, “so … what … you really don’t have anything to say?” At which time I stepped forward and declared, “ladies and gentleman, I believe we have a winner.” We all wept. For various reasons. And agreed that we were now ready to embark upon the website redesign.
Below is what our 2nd website redesign since 2004 looked like before this, our 3rd redesign, which began in January of 2019 (this 2nd website redesign was finalized circa 2010, and had been used since that time):
No CMS behind it. Just an incredible amount of blood, sweat and tears in the form of Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Oh, and (gasp) even some embedded FLASH objects for good measure. Oh yes, it was time.
Our first step was to select a CMS, or Content Management System, upon which to build our new site. This was not a difficult choice. In our experience WordPress is, without question, one of the most flexible CMS solutions available, and since all of us were already extremely familiar with it, this made our choice in this regad relatively easy.
With our chosen CMS in hand we did some hosting provider comparisons and secured ourselves a hosting package that met all of our load time and performance requirements.
Our final step was to re-map our primary domain name http://www.mvsltd.com/ over to our new WordPress hosting space.
With that complete, we finished up by setting up domain forwarding for each of our secondary domains:
- http://www.mindvaultsolutions.com/ ➜ http://www.mvsltd.com/
- http://www.mvs-ltd.com/ ➜ http://www.mvsltd.com/
And alas, the website upon which you now read this very article is the final result.
Is it the greatest website in the world? Almost certainly not. But we think that it’s both beautiful, and informative. And these are two qualities that we strive to achieve in every single design challenge that we take on.
Thanks so much for reading about our brand redesign adventure.
Should you ever find yourself in the middle of one, and feel that you could use some assistance and / or design inspiration, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us.