Christopher Hesselberg is a photographer specialising in capturing high quality product pictures of exclusive watches and jewellery for high-end clients like Bolou Fine Jewellery.
For Christopher, I designed a new brand and website to match the high standard of his work, as well as his ambitions for future clientele.
A personal brand
Christopher is a tall guy, with a signature bronze-red beard. He’s down to earth, very approachable and funny, but also extremely dedicated and passionate – a perfectionist.
Another special thing about Christopher is that he has ADD and Tourette’s syndrome, and is dyslexic as well. But despite struggling with all this at a younger age, Christopher has become very honest and outspoken about it – something one can only greatly admire.
These unique, visual and mental characteristics, as well as Christopher’s own mission of providing his clients a great, personal service, were the main inspirations for the personal brand.
Colors
Christopher himself inspired the colors for his brand. The primary color of the brand is ‘eyedropped’ from Christopher’s beard. Yep! We even discussed changing his primary color based on the season, as Christopher’s beard becomes a lot lighter in the summer.
I also went in and tweaked the colors to make sure that the HSB values were exactly dividable by 5, something I knew Christopher would appreciate as a person who can’t leave the volume on the TV at 4, or 9, or 14 – it has to be 5, 10 or 15.
Logo
Initially, we talked about a small update of his existing logo, but as soon as I started working with it we agreed to redesign it entirely.
The new logo combines Christopher’s initials, which made up his original logo, in a design inspired by an eye, a camera lens, and a clock. In fact, Christopher’s “c” is modelled after the time ten minutes past two o’clock – the exact time Christopher always sets on watches when taking photos.
Typography
Since Christopher is dyslexic, when picking the typography for his brand, I got the idea to only use small letters. This gives the brand a unique and very informal tone, which we both agreed worked well.
Website
Christopher’s original website was made using Adobe Portfolio which was very restrictive, so he agreed to move onto a WordPress solution.
While designing and developing the website, I focused especially on the tablet version, since Christopher has a tablet and uses it when he is out on the go. It was important for him that he would be able to show a potential new client his work on a smaller screen.
SEO
Choosing a WordPress solution, I was able to work with the SEO of Christopher’s Website. We focused on the words “smykke fotograf” (Danish) and managed to get Christopher on page 1 within this search.