E&L have been working with start up boutique babylikestopony to develop branding, marketing & business strategy.

babylikestopony’s mission is to provide women with products to make them look and, most importantly, feel smokin’ hot. We call it lustful lifestyle, it’s indulgent, it’s defiantly sexy, it’s a little naughty and it’s undeniably empowering. Sourcing products from all over the world, many of which have not been available in Australia before babylikestopony is here to give Justin a hand bringing sexy back.

E&L developed a branding concept which walks the line between edgy and beautiful, taking inspiration from vintage couture fashion and overlaying a cheeky contemporary aesthetic. The brand personality extends through the tone of voice in social media which is already generating a great response in the pre launch teaser period. The social media strategy covers facebook, twitter, tumblr and will soon include YouTube and Vimeo. As well as the social media presence E&L developed a teaser web site to showcase the products and act as a hub for all the activity. Currently in final stages of production is the ecommerce shopping site which is due to launch in a matter of weeks.

Babylikestopony.com

Babylikestopony on facebook

Babylikestopony on twitter

Babylikestopony on tumblr

We’ve been working with the fantastic team at TagMan developing a suite of document templates which present a sophisticated and cohesive brand image.

TagMan offers a killer new single-tag solution to the problems of online campaign tracking. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site, online marketers can save time and money in the way they track campaigns and see how all online channels are working together.

Learn more about TagMan on their site and check out some of our work below:

LoyaltyDeck is a new offering in the loyalty management space, created by LoyaltyTech as a software as a service solution. Developed to compete with large, expensive & complex loyalty management tools, LoyaltyDeck provides all the benefits of the established options but at significantly lower cost and with increased usability.

The brand was developed to grow in to a suite of products using the ‘deck’ nomenclature. The icon is based on a stylised deck of objects and incorporates an arrow motif representing forward movement and connection with the intended audience. A complimentary colour palette for future iterations of the brand has also been developed so that the suite will inherit the icon, deep grey and typography of the master brand while differentiating each product through its name and colour coding.

E&L also worked with LoyaltyTech to roll the brand out to other key collateral such as the LoyaltyDeck website, brochures, posters and trade show presence.

Visit loyaltyDeck.com

Seems to me that with the imminent release of improved iPhone multitasking, I say improved because it’s always been there, just blocked from developers to protect battery life, it’s time for a live home screen.

One of the criticisms that’s often hurled at the iPhone interface is that it’s fairly poor at providing ‘at a glance’ information. Wake from sleep, for example, gives you time, date, and… that’s it. Unless you count the wallpaper of your pet/child/significant other as information. You need to unlock and dig in to individual apps for meaningful info.

But it seems like an easy fix would be to make all those little app icons work much harder for us by having them react to live info. Weather is an obvious one, it’s an optimistic little icon, suggesting it’s 22 degrees and sunny ALL THE TIME. Well, it’s not, so why doesn’t it tell me that? Facebook tells me the number of new events but no info to let me decide how important those events are, same with mail and messages and any number of social media apps.

What I’d love to see is a kind of mash up of the current iPhone home screen and OS X’s widget dashboard. A configurable area that gives you ‘at a glance’ info about what’s most important to you.

Mine could look something like this:

Easy, I’ve got my latest messages, weather, FB updates & upcoming appointments with just a glance at my phone. Oh, and the time and date too. Now that we’ve got our icons working harder, all that’s left to do is work out how we make them into delicious little cup cakes.

It seemed fitting to be sending the site for our favourite French bistro, Le Pelican, live over dinner with friends last Sunday night with a glass of red in the other hand. We chose Sunday night for the update as it’s the lowest traffic period for the current site and there was likely to be disruption during the switch, we weren’t expecting the dinner party to coincide, but it all worked out thanks to the wonders of understanding hosts, a MacBook and wireless internet.

The site builds on the branding we previously developed and is built on, WordPress, our small business platform of choice, to make updating a breeze.

Jeff and Ally intend to keep us entertained with recipes, special events and news, so if you’re a fine food fan jump on the site to sign up for the newsletter, join their Facebook fan page or follow Le Pelican on Twitter.

With the branding complete and implemented across stationery, signage and now online we’re sad to say our work is almost done, just some search engine optimization over the coming weeks and some social media advice to keep us coming back. Fortunately we don’t need an excuse to come back and enjoy the fine food and wine at the bistro. I can almost taste Jeff’s house smoked salmon now.

Visit the new site

Vitamin L is a nutrition and wellness practice that offers a personalised approach to nutrition, specifically designed to meet your current and future health goals. It’s all about regaining your vitality and getting the most out of every day. We developed the Brand in close consultation with Vitamin L’s founder who wanted to reflect the vitality of the service and a fresh new way of living a healthy and energetic life. We developed a personal, genuine and infectious tone of voice for Vitamin L’s communications and a visual brand that uses movement and citrus colours to reflect these traits.

To get Vitamin L started we also developed a simple WordPress based web site. WordPress is a great platform for small business as its massive range of plugins means it’s extremely cost effective to develop. Its simple and powerfull cms features also mean that once it’s built small business owners can update the site themselves with minimum ongoing costs.

Visit VitaminL’s new site

I have to admit, I walked past this restaurant for years, having placed it firmly in the “old school European restaurant my parents would have dated at category”, based purely on the signage design. I was missing out. When finally dragged in kicking and screaming something about crimes against typography, the experience was truly amazing and totally out of step with my assumptions. This was a contemporary French bistro to rival any in Sydney.

We had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful chef/front of house team, Jean François (Jeff) and Aly, and were invited to work with them to develop a new brand that better represented what Le Pelican is all about. Here’s the result. It’s a far more contemporary approach that also pays homage to Jeff’s Basque influences (The pattern is based on the Basque Cross) with a little revolutionary fervour thrown in. We love it and we hope the new brand positions Le Pelican better so it can claim its rightful place as one of Sydney’s finest dining experiences.

With the brand now in place we’re currently working with the team to update their web site and social media strategy. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you’re keen to try it yourself, and you should, they’re at 411 Bourke Street Surry Hills, 9380 2622.

Gallery

Mesh Marketing are a boutique Sydney-based agency that provide personalised communications, sales and marketing strategies for high-end brands and clients. Working closely with Mesh, E&L developed a slick flash based site that is clean, elegant and subtly inclusive of the ‘attention to detail’ that Mesh ensure they provide to all of their clients. The site builds upon the existing Mesh brand with unique design elements, animation and interaction archetypes that reflect their upscale style and personality.

But it’s not just branding and eye candy, we implemented some advanced flash techniques that ensure search engine compatibility. These have ensured the site’s ranking has moved from somewhere in Siberia to page one on key search terms.

Visit Mesh Marketing’s new digital home

There’s no room in my life between my phone and laptop for a third device. No need, no niche to fill, unless… just maybe, hiding behind the iPad launch is real game changing potential.

That potential could be in digital magazines.

Real, rich, beautifully designed magazines with long form content, photography, video, social media, interaction and on demand digital delivery. That sounds like something I might just go for and I’m guessing many others will too. My laptop is just too uncomfortable to lay back on the couch and page through the latest Monocle or GQ, and the iPhone screen is just too small.

There’s been a few attempts lately to demonstrate how magazines could successfully cross over into digital:

The Wonderfactory and Time, Inc.

Mag+ by Bonnier R&D

Both look to me strikingly similar in form & functionality to the iPad, the only missing element is the publishers getting their content together. The monetisation is there with the iTunes Store/App Store model. The technology is ready (connected, multi touch). The device price point is reasonable. Even better, as far as gadgets go, the iPad is pretty green, if it can also replace the felling of thousands of trees for magazine production its sustainability factor gets a big thumbs up.

So, no surprise, it’ll be content and consumer take up that will shape this particular potential future of magazine consumption. The rest of the ducks seem to be in a row and the potential is damn exciting. For advertisers, for content creators and for all of us who like to curl up with a good magazine.

UPDATE MARCH 2 2010

Seems Condé Nast are conspiring to make me buy an iPad… Apple iPad versions of Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour magazines are on their way, according to Brand Republic.

Read the story

To all our friends, family & colleagues, thank you for helping to make our inaugural year at E&L Consultancy so successful and enjoyable. Hard to believe it’s been just 8 months since we hit the big green go button, we’ve achieved so much and it’s been incredibly rewarding. We’re truly privileged to have this opportunity to work with & be supported by such passionate, enthusiastic and talented people.

We sincerely wish you all the best for the year ahead as we look forward to a thriving, fantastic and sustainable 2010!

That sound you can here is us popping a bottle of Champagne, Holiday Cheers!

E&L