Retouching a 70 Year Old Logo & Designing a Responsive Website for Francis Chambers Ltd
Francis Chambers & Co Ltd has been in business for over 70 years and was first established in 1947 by Mr Francis Chambers when Francis passed away in 1977 Neil Twynham became a partner (He first joined the company in 1960 as an apprentice armature winder) two years after becoming partner he later became managing director of the company.
His son, Gavin, joined the company in 1988 and just like his father worked his way up. Neil passed away in 2009 and Gavin became managing director of the company.
They are specialist Electrical Motor Engineers who are based in the heart of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Francis Chambers are a well-established company with a trusted reputation in the industry and achieved certification to the internationally recognised standard ISO 9001:2015.
They specialise in motor and electric pump overhauls and refurbishments, Coil rewinds, Transformer Rewind & Repair all Types Of Electrical Motors and undertake all types of machinery work.
They are also well known for stocking Yorkshires largest selection of 3 phase foot and flange mounted motors up to 250kw Francis Chambers Electrical Services are suppliers of a wide range of motors, pumps, fans and transformers and feature manufacturers such as Remco, Grundfos, Vent-Axia and Ziehl-Abegg supplying theses electric motors up and down the country.
We have been working with Gavin and the team at Francis Chambers for a number of years through the AJR Group™ Implementing and supporting their IT and Cloud Computing Solutions.
The time had come for the company to upgrade their website and bring it in to the 20th century. The old website was in desperate need of an upgrade as it was an old static based website in urgent need of a face lift to better represent the company and its future moving forward.
Retouching a 70 year old logo
The first area of the project we needed to focus on was their logo, now the logo has been in use for over 70 years and something that customers have become so accustomed to and not something that the company wanted to change.
We had the task of bringing this logo to life as a digitised vector for use on web and overall better usage moving forward. The old website had some scanned in text that had the horrid yellow stained effect behind the fuzzy lettered image in the corner of the site
The original logo had been painted on the external building signs. The only version of the logo they had was from a newspaper cutting In the office on the wall there is an old newspaper cut out framed that also displays the icon celebrating 40 years in business so that newspaper must be from the late 80’s around 1987.
These images were of bad quality and not something we could have used to create a vectorised version.
We decided that we would take a picture of the logo from the external signage mounted above the building and use this to help us draw a neat version that we could vectorise.
The first stage of this process was for us to draw their logo the good old fashioned way with pencil and paper. We drew a grid on A4 sized paper so we could construct the letters and form their original icon.
Once the drawing was complete we outlined with black ink and scanned it into the computer and taking the logo into illustrator where we then drew the logo digitally with the vector pen tool over our black outlined image to compile a vectored version of the original painted logo
We then matched up the lettering with what was shown on the sign to not disrupt anything visually that had been there for so long.
The final outcome was a success and both the client and we were happy. We could now move on to designing them a brand new updated website that looked like it belonged in the 20th century.
What we did for the website project
As with most website projects we aim to focus on clean design, easy navigation and usability which we injected into the Francis Chambers website.
Paying close attention to their colour scheme of primary colour orange and black and using plenty of white space to break up parts of the website to highlight its content.
The websites is an informative site so its main function is to inform visitors and potential customers to who Francis Chambers are as a company and what they do for their customers, paying close attention to highlighting the company’s heritage and trusted reputation.
To visualise this element of trust and customer service we wanted to introduce an element of openness in the design. We decided to take a series of photographs of the building to have as full width images on the top half of the website being the first thing a visitor to the site will see. We did this with every page introducing a new image.
The navigation bar was made transparent to not intrude the image and represent an open and transparent approach as a business.
For example, the home page has a photo of the front of the building from a distance as if your stood outside and first been introduced to the business. As you move on to the next page which is about us we angled the shot of the photo to appear as you’re stood right outside the office entrance drawing you in closer and making you feel warmer to the business.
As you go to the contact page we have a close-up of the sign with the heading displaying “WE ARE HAPPY TO HELP” displaying closeness as if they are right in front of you open to help.
Next is the repair page we used an existing image of a certain motor they repair. We used this image due to the fact that this motor was not available for us to photograph and it was the only image they had and a little heritage brought over from the old site.
To the rear of the building, they have a trade counter so we photographed the sign to the trade counter as a guiding you in feel. The idea was to be open and transparent to the visitor and guide them around the site while they learn about the company and its history.
Services Included & After Care
- Migration of domain and email accounts over to our hosting provider
- The digitisation of the company logo
- Photography
- Ongoing Website Maintenance | Backup Solution Implemented
- Office 365 implemented and configured for emails, office suite and file sync between devices.
- Email Setup to office computers and work mobile phones etc.
- Other IT Services implemented and maintained through the AJR Group™
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The name pertains to the fact that the brand purchase and refurbish properties to a very high standard thus making them “hot” houses. The word “haus” is the German word for “house”
