Urmee Khan founded Rakhana to use her considerable experience in journalism to help businesses deal with negative press. Coming from an impressive career working for CNN and Business Insider, Urmee set up this crisis comms company that would be totally different to normal PR or comms agencies and needed to be discrete as most clients had NDAs set up. She needed a brand to reflect the specialist nature of her agency and speak to the sort of clients she wanted to reach.
Rakhana
PR
www.rakhana.co.uk
After an in depth discussion with Urmee, we established that the Rakhana branding needed to be very clean and easy to understand but also including movement and creating a sense of calm, which Urmee felt was important to reflect the way the business combats the stressful situation of dealing with negative press. She also wanted to incorporate a drawn asset she already had and a modern masthead logo (like most magazines have) that gave a nod to her journalist background.
Once we had established what Urmee wanted to achieve with her brand, we could start creating the main concepts such as using a wordmark logo inspired by newspaper mastheads, using the drawn asset as an icon and the main colour schemes.
With the overall look and feel of the brand in place, we could refine it to exact colour shades, fonts, spacing, imagery, etc to create a complete set of brand guidelines to ensure everything worked towards creating the image of Rakhana Urmee wanted to project.
Using our brand guidelines, we could create assets for Rakhana such as a website, social media logos and imagery, printed material such as headed paper, business cards and promotional items which all matched the brand perfectly to maintain consistency.
The crux of designing the Rakhana website was matching the branding with a very simple and clear user experience as the nature of the business meant that people coming onto the website needed to see very quickly that Rakhana could help them with their negative press issues.
Our website development team built the website, once Urmee had approved our design, with user experience and search engine optimisation in mind. They ensured the website worked exactly as it should, looked great and was set up to rank well on Google.
With everything approved and ready to go, we helped Urmee launch her new brand by giving her advice on how best to promote it through social media and other channels in a way that was consistent with the business image and would get her brand noticed by the kinds of clients she wanted to attract.
As, essentially, the centre piece for any business’s marketing, Rakhana’s website had to encapsulate everything the business was trying to express and one of the ways Urmee wanted to do this was to incorporate movement into the design as well as keeping the clear, clean branding which helped to create that sense of calm. We achieved this by having a headline banner with a video of waves in darkened colours to combine the sense of trepidation Rakhana’s clients are often experiencing when they seek Urmee’s help with a feeling of calm that they’ve come to the right place to get their problems resolved.
Because of the nature of Rakhana’s business, we wanted to keep the navigation of the website as simple as possible so potentially stressed and worried business owners could see that Rakhana could help them straight away and access any information they needed very quickly. It is designed to look appealing and be equally easy to navigate on a mobile phone or a tablet as well as on a computer.
Urmee wanted a modern masthead logo that gave a nod to her journalist background and to use a drawn asset she already had. The result was a clean and clear masthead logo just using the company name in monochrome colours while using the distinctive drawn asset as an icon to counterpoint the main masthead logo and appear on promotional items such as tote bags. The overall result is simple yet distinctive which reflects Rakhana’s dedication to clarity and their position as not a typical PR and comms company.
In creating Rakhana’s stationery suite, we kept the feel of simplicity, calmness and journalistic savvy using the magazine style masthead logo and a deliberately limited colour palate of black and tan on a white background. Using our own brand style guide, we were able to keep all the type fonts and colour shades consistent with the brand so the stationery perfectly matched the online media. Adding in Raknana’s drawn symbol made all the printed material more distinctive but kept it clean and clear to reflect what the business does and how it is different from most PR companies.