Harmsen Schilderwerken

Harmsen Schilderwerken is a one-man painting company based out of Arnhem, Netherlands. Jack Harmsen, the one-man, has been in the business for over 30 years and has never had the need for a brand, website or any sort of identity. However, with recent business slow down, and the boom in internet culture, Harmsen knew that he needed to create a brand that people would be able to recognize, but more importantly, have an online presence. The "old fashioned way" of word-of-mouth business was not as successful as it used to be. So that is where I come in. As a student working with Buro 302, we took on Harmsen as a client and I was assigned to create an identity and a website for him. I had multiple one-on-one's with him discussing general ideas behind the style, colors, and feel he wanted his brand and website to have. Despite the Dutch-English language barrier, Jack and I were able to work together and discuss all ideas he and I had for this project. He wanted something simple that his long time clients, who are not as internet savvy, to be able to navigate through his website easily, but still be attractive enough to get the attention of new, more internet-abled clients. From this, I created a simplified version of a paint bucket with the paint brush atop. I used a large, easy to read, straight forward typeface that looks professional. I used splashes of cyan-blue throughout the identity because Harmsen wanted his site to feel fresh and new; a sort of face-life for his business. Overall, Jack was really happy with how his identity turned out, which made me really excited about it, too! This was a very fun, and new project for me; I've never been solo on such an important, potentially life-saving (business wise), project! I did, however, have some help from my Dutch coworkers when it came to translating the site from English to Dutch. It was also the first time I created a real-life website, that was launched Spring 2015: http://harmsenschilderwerken.nl.