Cocker & Carr

Branding
Print
Web

Sheffield's most down-to-earth design studio meets Sheffield's most down-to-earth estate agent.

Not Your Typical Estate Agent

If Ink & Water were an estate agent, we’d probably be quite a lot like Cocker & Carr Estate and Letting Agents. Based up in Crosspool, Thom Cocker, Georgina Carr and the rest of the team run a friendly, approachable estate agency whose down-to-earth ethos differentiated them from most of their Sheffield competitors. This wasn’t conveyed very well through their visual identity though, whether it was in print, online, or on signage.

Cocker & Carr branding extract — An extract from Cocker & Carr’s new visual identity guidelines.

Enhancing The Brand

We were delighted to be asked to put our graphic design skills into producing Cocker & Carr’s new brand identity. The company pride themselves on being both highly professional but personable, so we needed to capture this ethos with a simple, eye-catching look that would translate across a range of material, from for sale signs, to newspaper adverts.

With such an obviously memorable name, we chose a typographic approach that would become an instantly recognisable identity whilst at the same time striking the right tone. We then bolstered this with a strong colour scheme (a must in order to stand out on the high street or in the suburbs) alongside some graphical flourishes including silhouettes of the owners dogs – already familiar to their existing customers and a neat way of marking their territory from their competitors. The new look has proved to be a very good move indeed.

Playful yet professional, the new visual identity underpins Cocker & Carr’s professional and personal approach

Now For A Website That Reflects The Brand

Our web design team love working on projects where the visual identity has been developed by us too. It creates unique opportunities to collaborate deeply to effectively convey the brand online. Cocker & Carr’s vibrant colours and modern typography were a great foundation to work from. We worked hard with the design team to ensure that carefully developed tone evoked through the new visual identity continued through into the design of the website.

Cocker & Carr website design on laptop and phone screens — Neater, clearer and more vibrant. Compared to the property listings page on the previous site, the new design is much more considered.

On the technical side, our brief from Thom & Georgina stipulated that it was important for Cocker & Carr’s modestly sized team to not be overburdened with maintenance and site updates. We provided robust integration with their chosen estate agency software that automatically updates their new site with their latest properties. This meant that the team were able to continue as normal, managing their properties in one central location, without having to repeat the same job over on their website.

Responsive Website Design for Cocker & Carr Estate Agent — Property pages have to communicate a lot of information quickly. We put a lot of time into making sure this information was clear and easy to navigate, including creating a custom icon set for the ‘at a glance’ info.

On top of that, Cocker & Carr get peace of mind from our managed hosting package – super-fast, secure website hosting, with automatic backups and weekly maintenance checks and updates.

This all came together in a vivid and memorable estate agency website that isn’t a chore to manage for the team in their Crosspool office.

View the website: www.cockerandcarr.co.uk

If you have an idea for a new project, or have an existing brand that’s starting to show its age, we’d really like to hear from you!