Logo design by Jo Goforth
Life and Soul offers tailored celebrations of life and end of life planning with a focus on inclusivity and the queer community.
Melanie Wilson is a queer grief specialist who hired me to help her design and fully rebrand her services.
She is a celebrant and a grief gathering organizer who is expanding her services into End of Life Planning and After Loss services.
With this expansion she wanted to work with a designer to bring her website to a new level that is welcoming, easy to understand, and personable.
Competitor Research
To begin my work cycle I researched the websites of NYC funerary services including funeral homes, officiants, and end of life planning companies.
In this research I found that while most offerings are very professional, they lack a personal touch. I also found that most of these websites had an overwhelming level of information. As someone with experience with grief I brought my experiences into the design, knowing that grief renders all tasks Herculean.
As such I started identifying ways to have Life and Soul stand out:
Personal Touch
Streamlined Copy
Simple and Clean Pages
Wireframes
Using Figma, I translated my first sketches into low-fidelity wireframes. I was then able to share these initial layouts with the client in order to receive feedback on what was working and what wasn't.
This feedback allowed me to combine and edit elements that the client liked, in order to create a final design outline.
Sketches
After analyzing death of the party's current website, noting all sections, and adding in my notes from discussions with Melanie, I used sketched out various mockups of layout options.
UI Design
During the design phase the assets were continually shaped to reflect Melanie's personality.
After several rounds of revisions with the client, utilizing both Figma comments and phone calls, we landed on a final design for all the desktop pages. After this we moved into our development phase.
I then built out the entire website, desktop and mobile, using Squarespace.
Logo Creation
As poppies are already and established part of the client's grief gathering logo, a poppy was used to continue to reflect remembrance and a bee was added to reflect life and growth as well as her own experience as a beekeeper.
Since we went with the design that invoked creation and sketching this reflected in the creation of the logo and the bees. The poppy design is intentionally illustrative of loose painting strokes, and the bees incorporating the romantic feel of loose lines and sketching.
Iterations on the logo design
Next steps
Following these designs, I was able to go ahead and translate them to Squarespace. During this process I also created custom template pages so that as her business grows she can continue to update her website, add more pages, add more events, and update her services while remaining within these custom designs.
I also collaborated with her to create custom business cards in the style of Victorian mourning stationary, as well as will be collaborating with her on her future print materials as needed.