The New Perennialist
Innovative gardening blog and webinar platform
Tony Spencer is a writer passionate about a new approach to gardening, so he wanted to start a blog to share his experiences with other enthusiastic gardeners worldwide. He was also ambitious. The online platform would feature webinars of interviews with leading planting designers discussing their beautiful projects. The challenge was to create a design concept for the website that would capture “The New Perennial” gardening style while having the functionality of a blog and the capability to store webinar recordings.
“I worked with David to create the brand id for my platform The New Perennialist with a focus on contemporary garden design. David put together a solid and elegant foundation for my brand, which has enabled me to grow my audience on a global level. The results have been impressive and I believe the branding is a key driver of that success.”
Tony Spencer, blog author & interviewer
Thorne Branding & Design’s research found that “The New Perennial” style is about appreciating the complete life cycle of a garden, so I created a design using a capital “P” formed by plants as they appear in the four seasons. To engage the user, the “Ps” would animate as the home page loaded, and the choice of P would depend on the current season. For example, the P for spring would appear between March 20th - June 21st.
We recommended branding the platform The New Perennealist and creating a subbrand for the webinars called The New Perennialist Talks. This decision made a clear connection between the blog and webinars and allowed the interviews to be promoted separately. A wordmark was designed for each using consistent typography and colour scheme.
The strategy for the user experience was to design the text to be easy to read with good typographic hierarchy while making the imagery as large as possible to appreciate the beautiful landscapes. The simple colour scheme of forest green, vibrant chartreuse and walnut brown complimented all the photography.
Thorne Branding & Design designed a series of valuable templates for the client to promote the webinars. There was an eblast template to advertise upcoming webinars and encourage registration and a social media template to build awareness and interest. The easy-to-use
templates came with an embedded wordmark, consistent colour palette and text elements in a coordinating typeface.
Scope of work
- Brand identity
- Website design
- Stationery
- Motion graphics
- Social media advertising
- Email marketing