Fast Web Media | Design

Creating a fresh look and feel for a digital marketing agency with over 20 years’ experience.

Fast Web Media is a well-established business with over 20 years’ experience in the digital marketing industry.

Introduction and Objectives

As an agency, we at Fast Web Media have worked with some of the most recognisable names across a variety of sectors. Carling, Barclays, the BBC, the English Premier League and Bravissimo are only a few clients who we have been fortunate enough to work with over the years.

In May 2015, Fast Web Media was acquired by the mporium Group, giving us the perfect opportunity to reassess our brand, services and ultimately our image.

“Things move pretty fast in digital, so it’s important we move that one step faster.”

To do so, we went back to basics and built Fast Web Media from the ground up. Working with a talented and experienced consultant, the Fast Web Media leadership team – consisting of one representative from each department – got to work to re-establish what Fast Web Media really stands for.

Rebuilding Our Foundation

The leadership team gathered together once a week over a six week period for a workshop conducted by our consultant. In each workshop, the aim was to achieve consensus around what Fast Web Media is and where it’s going. Debate was passionate, but ultimately progress was made and we managed to achieve our goals at each workshop.

As with any good branding exercise, going back to basics meant re-establishing what our purpose, guiding principles and tone of voice are. Once we’d understood these core principles, we locked them down in a brand book and could use them to shape everything about our visual identity and website.

Creating Our Identity

To match our new-found principles, it made sense that we revisit our dated logo and make sure it reflected exactly what we wanted the company to look like. After all, first impressions matter.

Following further brainstorming sessions, we uncovered the main ideas that we wanted the logo to represent:

• Innovation
• Resourcefulness
• Partnership
• Ambition

Our graphic designer set to work, turning these words into aesthetically pleasing logo ideas, eventually landing on four distinct choices. After a presentation, the Fast Web Media team unanimously and immediately agreed on one logo in particular; and the new Fast Web Media centrepiece was curated.

What It Symbolises

• Innovation: we aim to bring new life to our clients through our forward-thinking strategies and approaches. Six elements are represented in all living things and so we landed on a hexagonal shape.
• Resourcefulness: we are resourceful like worker bees, which are represented by the yellow and black colours. Additionally, the worker bee is the symbol of Manchester, so the company’s Mancunian heritage is represented.
• Partnership: we work in tandem with our clients and other agencies, and this sense of partnership is represented by the triple hexagon.
• Ambitious: we are ambitious, both for ourselves and our clients, and this determination to grow and succeed is represented by the outward arrows.
• Fast Web: we wanted to have a direct representation of the Fast Web name in the logo as well, and we achieved this with the increasing arrows (‘Fast’) and the spider’s web style look of the overall design (‘Web’).

The New Website

With the new logo and brand book locked down, we needed to make sure our new ethos was reflected on our new website.

We opted for a minimalist look that didn’t over-explain the services we provide. After all, our offering is bespoke and tailored to each client and their individual goals. Trying to feature a description for each and every service risks complicating our messaging and leaving potential clients more confused than enlightened.

We split the site into four distinct sections: Who We Are, What We Do, Articles, and Get In Touch. Within those pages lay crisp, clear text that communicated clearly what the titles promised. For example, within What We Do are a series of Case Studies that display some of our best work across our different digital disciplines. Meanwhile, the busiest area of the site – the Articles section – was made easier to understand with clear tagging and large, attractive imagery.

Finally, we wanted to really stand out and showcase the stunning area we work in – MediaCityUK. For that, we enlisted the help of photographer Simon Buckley, who has worked on projects such as Not Quite Light, to bring our website to life through professional photography of our team and MediaCityUK.