Il Punto! Merceria

A dream project that I've been involved with from start to finish – and which is still in progress. An experimental creative haberdashery in Siena, Italy, that revolutionises the concept of haberdashery as a stale old shop selling ribbons and sewing kits. The shop's ethos is based on recycling, reinventing, repairing and transforming: it's a treasure-trove of ideas, where fashion meets the imagination and mending means customising, making an old or cheap garment unique, precious and at the cutting edge of fashion. I was first asked to design the logo: 'punto' in Italian means 'stitch' as well as 'punctuation mark' and the shop sells a wonderful collection of vintage and special buttons, so it seemed logical to play with the exclamation mark and incorporate the buttons in the logo. The typeface chosen was the wonderful modern classic Neutraface, which perfectly expresses the personality of the brand. The brand colours were also chosen to decorate the shop. After this, the ladies also needed a web presence: part of what they do is help and teach clients how to use their imagination to repair their garments, as well as create new objects (the shop makes beautiful jewellery), so they needed a showcase on the web and a blog where to post their tutorials. It's not meant to be an ecommerce – yet, just a vehicle to get an audience and get more clients that need customisations and special jobs. And it works: despite having just started and having written only a handful of posts, they are already getting enquiries from all over Italy, for things like customised trainers for brides, and so on. The website design (obviously responsive) plays with the brand colours and uses textures in the backgrounds to immediately evoke the right, 'crafty' visual atmosphere. It's also a vehicle for some of my photography in a few galleries. I also created time lapse videos for them, that show them at work transforming boring garments into sparkly, magical things: an example of video is here. The most important thing is the blog: I have educated the clients on all that they need to know to create useful blog posts, from SEO (using Yoast), compressing the images, writing effective copy, creating effective headlines and high-quality content. I have set up Google analytics for them (as well as a Google + page). I have taught them how to keep the site as lean as possible by installing a number of plugins that hugely help speed things up, and so on (although their choice of home page, a big blog images gallery, unfortunately slows things down quite a bit. Their choice!) Client education plays a really important part in my projects: I make sure that my clients walk away with all they need to know in order to run an effective website that follows best practices and yields the best results for them and their brand.