Free Power Boards: header design
by Sergio Ordonez at 7:32 pm on Mascot design, Logotypes
We are going to inaugurate a section that i think it might be interesting, it’s about real cases of orders we did in our beloved SOSFactory.
In this case we are going to see the design we did for the header of Free Power Boards, a content management system for forums based in PHPbb which is about to launch it’s third version. They ordered us to created their new header design.
Click in the image to see the original design.
The first thing you can see, is that it’s a funny design, but with poor graphic quality. The penguin designs are clipart, which means it’s not an exclusive design, the logo is pretty basic and the colors aren’t ugly, but they could be better.
The first thing the client asked us to do, was the design of a mascot and the typical button encouraging us to register in their website, we’ll see that when you work, a good client can turn into a really excellent one 
. At first, the work was estimated in 300US$.
After a while chatting, we got to the conclusion that the mascot would be a llama. At first, i had some doubts about the choice of the animal… but the client orders, you know. When the first sketch was in my hands, it was clear that the animal had a lot of potential, take a look:
This design was funny but something was missing, we thought… “Since Free Power Boards V3 is a lot about customization, we really want to show just how customizable it is. Having the mascots actually *building* the layout would be great”. Said and done:
This started to look funny. Our character would be painting the header with new colors, more vibrant. We just had to do two corrections:
- You can see that the character right now is a normal llama. We decided to give him a corporative uniform.
- Another little detail; look at the painting cans, anybody would say that our workers (company image) are a little bit negligent… we aren’t transmiting the addecuate message.
Our characters would look like this after the corrections.
We did two designs of the same character to give our client more options, but they liked it so much that they bought both designs, we simply changed the face of the second one to make it a bit different. The job raised to 500US$, in exchange we did a new version of their logo.
Here you can see the final lines for both mascots.
Let’s see the color now. In the first place, we asked for a final version of the new design, to make sure the colors of our mascots would look good in the new background:
Click in the image to see the new design.
We were doing some color tests and it turned out that the colors that better adapted to orange were fresh tones, here you can see the full color mascots:
In this point of the order we thought it would be much better to add another llama to hold the “Join Free” button, we offered to do it for free. From the design we already had, we did some minor modifications of the face and color, and it looked like this:
Sometimes, when the design has so many possibilities, i prefer to do some extra little work so the design doesn’t seem incomplete, as a reward we will have a new super design in our portfolio, and who knows what else… Ok, let’s see the header, the logo consisted in a metallic effect with a modern font, technological and blunt but fun:
The client was very happy with the design but he thought the text in the right side should dissapear. We gave him several options and he ended up ordering a new character. This time it would be something more comical, we thought in adding a new llama in counterpoint from the rest, bigger, clumsy and very funny. It’s mission will consist in cleaning the “V3″ of our logo… here you have the final version of the character:
And that is how we created this wonderfull header, at the end the design was 700US$. The client ended up winning because he got a good disscount, and we too because we enjoyed a lot this work, and we did various sales without having to change customers and on top of that, we have a great addition for our portfolio.
As you can see, when you work well, a good client can turn into an excellent one
We are actually working in some banners, he hope this new relationship will last a long while.
You could check out Free Power Boards website to see the live design. Thanks a lot to Chris, CEO of Free Power Boards for giving me permission to write this article.