Alliance Law Firm P.A. is a modern, forward-thinking law firm in southeastern Minnesota. Their website was beginning to look a little dated, and they knew it was time for a refresh. During our early discovery sessions, I recommended they consider a logo refresh due to some problems I identified with it.
I served as the designer, developer, and primary point of contact for this project. A colleague of mine also helped manage the project and assisted with hosting and network configuration. Two lawyers and a paralegal from Alliance Law Firm worked with us on this project.
Logo
This was Alliance Law Firm’s old logo:
There’s a few issues with it, but the main ones I identified were:
- Mark is too busy, causing scaling issues
- Kerning issues
- Linear arrangement of words may not be ideal in some situations
The folks at Alliance Law were very open to exploring some options to fix the issues with the logo, however there was some concern about deviating too far from the old design. Being an established business, they already had a lot of printed material and signage that would be expensive to change.
New logo
My goals for the new logo were to:
- Redesign and simplify the mark
- Keep it familiar enough that it felt “at home” alongside the old logo
- Fix lettering issues
- Improve versatility by providing flexible arrangements of elements
By far, the biggest challenge was simplifying the mark. Initially, I attempted to redesign it while keeping all the existing elements (sword, shield, scale, leaves, and the sound block). I was struggling to come up with any kind of simplified arrangement, and realized that I needed to remove elements to make it work. During a discussion with the folks at Alliance, they suggested that the most important elements to them were the sword and shield.
The original logo is set in Abhaya Libre. I experimented with other Bodoni and serif typefaces, but found that Abhaya Libre has some unique characteristics. I didn’t want to stray too far from the original design, so I decided to keep the typeface the same.
After several more iterations, we had the finalized design.
I then designed a “flat” version of the mark, and different logo additional arrangements to provide flexibility in many use-cases.
Logo mockup examples
Website
As I mentioned, the primary goal of the website part of the project was to refresh and modernize the look and feel.
Actual screens from old website
The folks at Alliance Law hired a professional photographer to take new staff photos, which we incorporated prominently in several areas of the website. They also recently opened a new office location in Eagan, Minnesota – so we revamped the contact page structure to clearly show both offices.
Another goal was to improve the information architecture of the website content through improved structure and wording through out the site.
The new site is a customized WordPress theme. After several rounds of iteration and revisions, we launched the new website.
Actual screens from new website
Website mockup examples
Wrap up
Overall, this was a fun project with several challenges that I could help solve. The team at Alliance Law Firm were also a pleasure to work with, and were very invested in the project.
This new website and brand refresh will help Alliance Law Firm continue to lead by example – helping clients with a modern approach in a traditional industry.
