Designing
Burst
Knowing when not to reinvent the wheel
I’ve previously written about how I ended up redesigning Brandsonvine late last year for an old friend of mine Michael Litman.
Redesigning his site was the primary focus at the time but we also considered the potential scalability of his rebrand. For example Brandsonvine was about branded vine content but there was the possibility of moving into food vines, film vines, dating vines, vines/video production in general and so forth.
We are Burst
About eight months after his site went live Mike decided to create a new company called Burst. He was getting a steady stream of good work and clients in from Brandsonvine but wanted to be able to move into short-form video production for multiple platforms not just Vine.
Having already established a look and feel for his previous company it came time to designing Burst and testing out the scalability of the design language that we had come up with half a year earlier.
Branding
Mike liked the idea of creating a visual representation of what the word burst meant. He wanted the logo to feel more active, with rays of content “bursting” out so to speak.
Brandsonvine had a very simple logo based around the shape of a vine (square) with a play icon (triangle) inside it. Logic dictated that any new logo for a company related to this should have a similar square logo with some icon within it.
We tried a few quick options but quickly settled on a square with a “star burst” icon inside it.
Colour wise Brandsonvine was green (like Vine) but Burst is platform agnostic so we chose a blue to complement the previous green and to allow both brands to sit well together.
Layout
Burst was envisioned as a simple one page site based on the Brandsonvine homepage, with a view to building out from this rather than trying to do it all on day one like we did with Brandsonvine.
The primary colour was changed from green to blue and the navigation at the top of the page became anchors to the sections below rather than links to other pages. The contact page was removed from the navigation and added to the bottom of the page. Images were updated and the header area became more of an introduction than a showcase.
In summary
In total Burst took about two hours to design and about two days to build, as always there was a long period of tweaking to get the build to match the designs. This short turnaround was accomplished by basing the site on an existing design and an existing code base.
As designers we love to explore and try different layouts and styles but it’s also important to create a design language which is adaptable, scalable and can live on for a client after you close Photoshop and move onto your next project.
Just one more thing…
We also jokingly discussed creating Vate which was going to be a vine dating site/app. This was another good test of our design language, this time going for pink with a heart icon within a square.
We didn’t take this any further as a) it’s vine/platform dependent b) in all likelihood Tinder is already working on this feature c) a pink heart was a bit too obvious and d) Mike hated the name Vate — I thought it was ingenious as it contained the v from vine and the ate from date but what do I know, I gave up working in advertising a long time ago. Besides, who needs another app?
