Hi friends! If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably noticed that it’s looking pretty different around here. After taking fourteen months off of live performance due to the pandemic I was feeling drawn towards creating a fresh start with my online presence. Therefore, one of my biggest goals this year was to revamp my branding and website. Despite many slow downs, I accomplished my goal and am very pleased with the results! Read on if you’re interested in the new branding, the process, and a few pleasing before/afters.

Brand elements

The first step of this project was to write a creative brief that described my brand’s value proposition, target market, communication goals, and design elements. This acted as a guide for all of the new content I was going to create.

Typically a creative brief is written by a business and given to a creative agency that they’re hiring for project work, but I found making my own to be extremely helpful in gaining clarity on my professional strengths, goals, and unique attributes. If you’re a performer I highly recommend trying your hand at a creative brief. If you’ve never done any sort of branding brainstorming before, I’d suggest starting with this “Brand Heart” workbook from Column Five Media. After that, check out their creative brief guide to dive a bit deeper.

Here’s the cover page and brand elements section from my creative brief. This will continue to act as my guide when creating any new owned media.

Website

You’re here! You can see it! What do you think? Designing this new site took the lion’s share of the time I spent on my re-branding. A lot of this time was spent just cleaning up my very neglected old website… Shenanigans included trying to switch hosting but bailing because I didn’t want to mess up my SEO, realizing I was 3 PHP versions out of date and that’s why my site was so slow, realizing my WordPress was over 10 versions out of date and that’s why it broke when I updated my PHP, learning my site was a toxic relic in the new world of SSL certificates and begrudgingly accepting that I had to pay more money to get that little lock icon in the URL bar, and embarking on using an entirely new WordPress theme because I thought it would be prudent (not infuriating) to learn a new site builder platform at the same time as updating my personal site – to name a few 🙃 Anywho, here’s the before & afters:

Home Page

Acts Page

Reviews Section

Booking Page

…And a few mobile screenshots

I wanted something clean, classy, and professional. My personal style, the types of acts I create, the costumes I design, and the gigs I work have all changed in the past few years. I wanted this new website to match the sophistication, growth, and crystallized direction that I’ve experienced personally and professionally.

Business cards

Who could forget business cards? I haven’t sent these to print yet, as I feel this design can still use some optimization. Or maybe what’s really holding me up is the tension between wanting a hello@lumaflow.net email address and not wanting to give google another $6 per month for G Suite. Google, haven’t I given you enough?

Social Media

I updated the headers on both Facebook & YouTube to match my website. This photo taken by my friend Elena Escobedo is one of my favorites and I love displaying it across the internet.

Resume

Finally, I even updated my performance resume with my new branding! I don’t use this often, but it was overdue for a revamp. You can also view this as a drop-down menu with an optional PDF download on my About page.

That’s it for the new branding tour! Thanks to anyone who checked this out for entreating my need to share my digital baby. Now that I’m back online, it’s time to bring on the gigs 🔥