Berlingual.com is complete and online! Phheww - it took a while longer to complete but as always, there ended up being more content & pages than expected ...We started this project 3 months ago and its been a challenge working for a Berlin based organisation ...So, what did we do for them? Well, we started by coming up with the company name itself! It can be incredibly difficult to come up with a name that one is catchy and secondly, is available as a domain name! Berligual is pretty perfect for a company that provides business English & exam training from Berlin ... or as Leo, the client, puts is:
"There are two specific target bases. Firstly, companies that require English for communication with their international clients, or when English is the lingua franca of their company and they need to improve their level internally. This is then in-company training for business professionals (currently this includes turbine engineers, pharmaceutical workers and architects).
The second client base is those that need to take the IELTS exam (later this will be expanded to the Cambridge ESOL exams as well as TOEFL), as they either need to study or work abroad. A significant percentage of them are doctors, dentists and other professionals whilst the others are students wanting to study in English native speaking countries or in their own country where a large part of the course is conducted in English. It's nothing to do with becoming a teacher. The split is about 50-50 business clients and 'exam' clients."
The logo was a pretty straight forward process based on the concept of 'quote marks' to indicate communication, although the final version is very different to the original concepts (and colours) that were developed.
However, the final logo definitely achieves significantly more impact. One of the key advantages of doing a complete branding, stationary and website design project is the efficiency achieved in the overall process. Often, E-creation works with clients who get their logo done with one company, their website with another and the marketing through yet another! Whilst there is often a historical legacy that leads to this type of working process, it's really not the best way to achieve a consistent message and feel for an organisation (in spite of lots of money being thrown at it!)
The website itself was constructed using HTML and doesn't have any database driven elements, which is quite unusual for E-creation these days, but many organisations do have simpler technical needs, so we are happy to build to their requirements.
The opening animation however is intelligent, something that we always try to strive towards rather than simply 'filling space' in a website. As Leon put it in his explanation of the design concept: "The second route is based on 'business words' that are positive and relate to benefits of using Berlingual for language development. These words are supplemented with simple icon interactions that are animated in a loop. This is easy to change or add words as the animation structure just needs to be updated with new content. This route adheres nicely to some of the stronger points outlined in the 'brand perception' analysis."
There are a few little clever technical things that might not be obviously though. We have used a Flash application to create many of the graphic headings on the fly. What does that mean? It means that we can change the text in the HTML and the graphics are created automatically so we don't need to keep going back to photoshop. This makes creating multilingual websites much easier whilst being able to maintain graphical integrity - something that will be a key feature in our work for XTM International.
Please do check out the website at www.berlingual.com and feel free to drop us any constructive feedback!
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