The LimeRibbon.com Blog

Branding LimeRibbon was equivalent to dressing a bunch of distracted six year-old boys for a party.  Good thing I have a six year-old boy, so I knew what we would be getting into. From the start, LimeRibbon bounded through the door and pounced in our laps as an evolving idea – a gift registry site utilizing social media to drive interest and be very, very lime.  Lime color 389U to be specific.  Most importantly, it was to be ready for a launch party by year’s end.

Go forth and design, right? Easier said than done when you’re not sure what you are designing.  How will the site function? What are all the pieces and parts? Will users have avatars?  Will there be advertising?  What is the content? And again, how is the social part and the shopping part going to tie together, exactly?

Sometimes having no limitations can feel very limiting. But by plunging into the visual design of LimeRibbon, we in turn developed a twist to the initial concept.  In the process of needing to fill a design with content, we started to ask ourselves why not integrate social media directly into the LimeRibbon platform? By thinking about LimeRibbon in a new way, we were able to design an experience of friends shopping together—socially, on the web.

At that moment the design started talking back to us.  Hey, “Bought anything juicy lately?™ Shop socially with us. What’s on your LimeRibbon?”  And thus the identity exploded like a kid who just ate a bunch of lime jellybeans. When we presented the concepts to the team, the developers saw LimeRibbon shoot to a whole new level.  The door was open and they knew where to take the technology behind the design idea, and then some.

Since then, LimeRibbon has been bouncing around in all kinds of crazy, imaginative ways, and we’ve been busy tackling it, dressing it and shoving it out the door for a great big launch party.

Whew!

Julia Briggs of Blue Star Design (www.bluestar-design.com) and Board Member of LimeRibbon.com.