James Divine

James Divine is a motivational speaker, author, educator, and musician with a heart for helping people recover from pain and hurt. His message of forgiveness and living help inspire others to move past the pain that is holding them back. His message is powerful for people of all walks of life and can have a huge impact on businesses dealing with low morale or culture issues. But, his message can help any individual reach new heights.

Rebranding

Complete Online Presence

Goals and Objectives

When I first met James, I saw him speak at a local venue. His story and message were powerful and his delivery was superb. I immediately recognized that his story needed to be shared to a broader audience. His performance was broadcast live on the local radio and filmed for reproduction. Undoubtedly, there was something special about this man and his message.

James and I began to build a friendship, and through that, it was clear to me that the James Divine brand and online presence did not match the caliber of his message. I felt obligated and inspired to help James reach a bigger audience. I was glad to do so and we quickly got to work.

Goals

Create a brand identity that demonstrated the compassion and integrity of James’ message
Create an online presence that matched the caliber and sophistication of his message
Give his potential clients the ability to easily engage his services
Provide a professional platform for James to promote his education, music, and speaking services

My Work

Branding and naming consultation
Brand positioning
Logo design
Business card design
UX Design and research
Information Architecture
Prototyping
Custom site design
Custom WordPress development
Mobile responsive design
SEO strategy

Researching and Prototyping

Because of James’ broad appeal, we needed to determine his ideal audience and talk to some of them. After some basic qualitative research and essential ethnography, we developed a persona. Using that persona as a basis, we began to construct a brand identity for James that would appeal to this persona. The site and all other considerations would be driven from this brand identity.

Branding and Logo

James’ ideal client is a mix of corporate executives with family and marriage educators. James’ brand needed to reflect a personal, reliable, friendly, trustworthy, and knowledgeable speaker and educator. We landed on the idea that a signature reflected this personality and explored ideas along that line of thinking. Ultimately, a signature serving as logotype for his brand was exactly what we needed.

Of course, a simple signature wouldn’t be enough. There needed to be style, professionalism, elegance, and the hint of a forward-thinking attitude. Iteratively, we landed on emphasizing J and D and shifting the logo upward to evoke the feelings we were looking for.

With the logo decided, we explored colors. The deep blues that remind people of trustworthiness, steadfastness, longevity, and peace were mixed with gold to emphasize prestige and elegance to appeal to the right audiences.

Site Prototype

With the branding, logo, message, and style nailed down, it came time to wireframe the Web site itself. We focused on structure and style and decided to lean on the overall architecture of WordPress to serve as the CMS (Content Management System). The key elements of the wireframe were to show how we were going to engage users and have a prominent call-to-action available to users.

Final Site

After creating high-resolution mock-ups and A/B testing, we set ourselves to the task of creating a customized WordPress theme for JamesDivine.net, getting it deployed and setting up the basic SEO strategy.