Our Process: Squarespace Website Redesign for Níkua, a Botanical Paper Craft Studio

Brands change over time. This is especially true for small businesses and personal brands, which are so closely tied to the person who created them. People change, and the context and the market evolve as well—a trend that has accelerated in recent years.

And when this inevitable change comes, how can we pivot and adapt to a new market, audience, or offering (of services or products)?

In this post, I’ll tell you about Níkua, Carmen Sánchez’s brand and workshop, which was launched in 2019 and has come a long way since then, with a pretty radical shift in its target audience.

This change required an overhaul of every aspect of the brand, including its visual identity and online presence, and in this article we’ll take a look at the design project.

Let's take a look at how we've managed to make Níkua's brand identity reflect its new personality, message, and services:

• How we are addressing the need for a repositioning of the brand.

• How we simplified and modernized your logo, and the changes we made to the brand’s color palette to reflect the studio’s maturity.

• And how we developed a website that aligns with their new brand identity.

Table of Contents

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Client:

Níkua, a botanical paper craft studio based in Valladolid, Spain.

Service:

Visual identity design (essential branding), minimal viable website design on Squarespace.

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The original context

Carmen is one of those clients who stick around for the long haul and, over the years, also become friends. We first worked together in 2019, when she had been running her project, Níkua, for a year.

At the time, Carmen came to me asking for help with her website, as she had been trying to set it up on her own for a while without getting the results she wanted. Ultimately, our first project together was a visual identity for her brand and a website design on Squarespace, which turned out to be the perfect platform for her: easy to use (she’d been trying to work with WordPress for a while without success and with a lot of frustration) and one that allowed her to keep her website up to date and post frequently on her blog.

Since then, we’ve stayed in touch for other smaller projects that have come up, but in 2023—five years after founding Níkua (her brand and workshop)—Carmen was at a point where her business model was evolving and changing, which called for a complete overhaul of her brand.

The visual identity and web design project

The research and strategy phase

What began as a brand and workshop dedicated to creating bridal bouquets and decorative pieces using paper flowers has evolved into a much more established workshop that now collaborates with other artists on more ambitious and large-scale projects, such as exhibition installations, store window displays, and props for commercial photo shoots, among others.

This evolution entailed not only a shift in the maturity of the studio and Carmen’s work, but also a change in the target audience: from brides and private clients to brands and artists.

With these changes in its brand identity and target audience, the Níkua brand needed its visual identity and website to reflect its new personality, message, and services, which were now aimed at a very different audience than that of bridal bouquets and decorative arrangements.

Visual identity design (branding)

We needed a fairly radical shift in our brand positioning: from a "quaint market stall" selling bouquets and decorative arrangements to an artist's studio that collaborates with major brands and artists in the field to create installations and custom pieces.

To achieve this, the first step was to rebrand its current visual identity (logo, color palette, and typefaces) to reflect this shift in the studio’s nature and maturity. The main changes and adjustments to its visual identity were:

Before and after the redesign of the Níkua website.

Add contrast and enhance visual impact:

We’ve incorporated a dark color to give the brand a sense of maturity and sophistication, combined with a very soft salmon shade for the backgrounds, which adds the touch of delicacy so characteristic of the brand and Carmen’s pieces. Furthermore, the strong contrast between these two colors conveys elegance and sophistication—exactly what we want to communicate through the brand.

Overall, we developed a design with greater visual impact (a concept we incorporated from the start using the Apricot web template from the Minimum Viable Web service), featuring a more elegant, modern, and sophisticated typographic palette.

We simplified the brand logo:

Initially, the concept behind the visual identity and the main logo was to evoke the feel of a bridal florist, with a design reminiscent of the stickers often found on bouquet wrappers. As we mentioned, this style was no longer consistent with Níkua’s brand identity, so we had to make adjustments to the logo to move away from this flower shop vibe and give it a slightly more understated look.

To achieve this, we removed the circular frame from the logo, as well as the illustration that accompanied it in its original version. We also removed the isotype (the accompanying illustration) and slightly thickened the strokes of the logo’s letters. After several rounds of testing, we agreed to keep the same typeface, as we felt it still worked well.

For the secondary version of the logo, we created a monochromatic version by removing the pink from the isotype, and changed the frame from an oval to a square with rounded corners, which looks more like a stamp and less like a flower shop sticker.

The icing on the cake was the new photos of Carmen and her workshop, which round out the professional image we wanted to convey.

Website design and development on Squarespace

For the website, we kept it on Squarespace, the platform we used to build the original site in 2019 and which Carmen feels very comfortable with (if you’re not familiar with Squarespace, I explain what it is and how it works in this post).

Squarespace's user-friendly interface allows Carmen to update the site's content whenever she needs to without worrying about "breaking" anything, keep her blog active with new posts, and easily update her project portfolio.

For the redesign, we used the minimum viable website service since we needed to keep project costs under control. We chose the Apricot template (one of the custom templates I offer for this service), which was designed for creative studios’ websites, with an emphasis on imagery and the portfolio.

This was exactly what Níkua needed for its website, and by customizing the template to reflect the new brand identity, the result is stunning.

In addition, we reorganized the information on the website, which had grown over the years and had become quite chaotic and disorganized:

• We simplified the presentation of Níkua’s current services so that it better meets the needs of Níkua’s audience when they visit the website.

• We reorganized the information and simplified navigation in the site’s main menu to make it much easier to understand what Níkua offers and to find your way around the relevant pages of the website.

• We placed much greater emphasis on Carmen’s photography and portfolio, highlighting her affiliation with various national and international organizations of artisan artists, as well as the nationally recognized brands with which she has collaborated.

• We gave greater visual prominence to testimonials from other artists and art directors to highlight the social proof and the trust that other professionals have in Carmen’s work.

• We added a more eye-catching call to action to get in touch with Carmen, since this is currently the website’s main conversion goal.

The result is a visually striking website that perfectly showcases Níkua’s work and values, and speaks directly to its target audience by providing the information they need to decide to contact Carmen.

And the icing on the cake has been all the positive feedback Carmen has received about the website from colleagues, partners, and clients.