I read and collect comics and I run a comic-collecting group on Facebook, which has brought me a few clients over the years. In this post I focus on one shop I branded and built, while also referring to another comic shop I built. Both these shops have been around for a while are doing quite well.
The first shop, Critters and Comics, had their branding done with another designer a few years ago and they wanted to stick with their branding. They already had a WordPress/Woocommerce site, but the site was very slow and prone to crashing. They tasked me with cleaning up the website look and feel, but also the backend to fix the loading times and prevent crashing. They had a staggering amount of plugins on the site which caused most of the headaches.
The client needed many of the plugins, so the tricky part was to weed out the resource-heavy plugins and to either find alternatives, or to find ones that combined some of the client’s needs into one plugin. This took many days to do, but finally, I was able to convince them to switch to a different theme which was resource-friendly, while also deleting and switching out some of the other plugins. It has now been almost two years, and the site has only been down twice due to hosting issues, compared to the once or twice-a-month downtime they experienced before that. Visit the site here to see the end-result.
Critters and Comics homepage design.
Midvaal Comics
Midvaal Comics tasked me to design their logo and website from scratch. The owner of this shop first only sold on various online marketplaces. When his business started to take off he contacted me to do his branding and build a website for him. His brief was as follow:
- A logo with a superhero-type character, but it shouldn’t infringe on someone’s copyright. The logo needed to be easy to reproduce on mugs and T-shirts, but with the minimum colours to reduce costs.
- The website had to be lightweight and easy to navigate with very few links.
- He wants to be able to load new stock himself and make changes whenever he requires.
These were all reasonable requests and I followed through.
The Logo
The basic tenets of any logo design class are to keep it simple, recognizable on any scale, and easily converted to black and white. I made a few attempts at the logo, but the client settled on the logo below. There is a resemblance to a certain pointy-eared knight of the night, but it works and won’t cause copyright headaches.
For the website, I had to do the opposite of what I was asked to do with the Critters and Comics website with respect to navigation. This was a bit easier to do since Midvaal Comics is a specialized comic shop and they only sell certain types of products. The result is a very clean website. Click here to visit the actual site. alternatively, you can view the thumbnails below.
Midvaal Comics homepage.
