In the ever changing world of real estate branding is key to survival. Subtle changes can make all the difference. When your clients know your brand they know what you are about. If you’re selling million dollar waterfront properties or farm houses in the middle of nowhere your brand mark can set you apart from the competition. The Jen Holden Group has had numerous logo changes, various marketing materials and fun projects along the way. When they came with logo modifications we knew just what to do.

Fixing the brand.

When you sell real estate and your name is Holden the first thought you have is “Holden the Key”. While this is a fun play on words it doesn’t convey selling million dollar plus homes. You need a clean concise mark that says we know waterfront properties and everything that comes with it. That’s were we jump in and dig into that mindset. What we come back with is a great study in logo design that not only conveys this message but offers a standalone mark that is easily recognizable as their own.

The brand re-imagined.

Trying to separate yourself from a crowd of thousands can be a daunting task. When a local real estate agent came looking for a logo we were excited to get on board. While selling homes all across Maryland Sid wanted to incorporate the great Maryland flag by try to avoid the over played use of the flag.

We decided to take it a step further and incorporate the flag with the letter “S” to create a solid mark for branding that can be used in virtually any situation. Simple enough it captures all elements of sophistication, Maryland and the luxury of home sales.

You will remember the people more than the place.

All good visual artists understand the importance of negative space, the empty area that draws attention to, and accentuates, the actual subject. Negative space (the artistic equivalent of a designer’s white space) is like the supporting cast whose duty is to make the star of the show stand out more by not standing out so much themselves. If you don’t think any part of your design should be intentionally blank, take a look at the World’s Worst Website Ever for an extreme example of the damage caused by too many objects competing for attention. In interaction design, white space isn’t just an aesthetic choice— it serves three essential functions.

White space has been proven to increase comprehension up to 20%.

1. Improving Comprehension
If cluttering your interface overloads your user with too much information, then reducing the clutter will improve comprehension. In fact, properly using white space between paragraphs and in the left and right margins has been proven to increase comprehension up to 20%, as pointed out by Dmitry Fadeyev, creator of Usaura. The skill of using white space lies in providing your users with a digestible amount of content, then stripping away extraneous details.

White space can be broken down into four elements: visual white space (space surrounding graphics, icons, and images); layout white space (margins, paddings, and gutters); text white space (spacing between lines and spacing between letters); and content white space (space separating columns of text).

Medium is a great example of striking a nice balance with all four elements of white space. First, think about the goal of the user from an interaction standpoint: users want to access interesting content as quickly as possible. The homepage immediately facilitates that goal by placing content front and center, with plenty of white space on either side to add emphasis. There is ample space around visuals and between lines of copy, although the padding around images could be more uniform (notice how the space to the left of each image is not consistent with space below).

Beyond improving comprehension, white space also helps create mental maps. Minimal white space is used between the top navigation and content stream, since both serve similar functions in driving the user deeper into content (and similar functions should be grouped together). Because the right-side navigation focuses more on creating and saving content, more white space separates it from the content stream. In this case, white space helps users assign different functionalities to different parts of the interface. Once users click through to an article, white space helps them focus on what they care about most: the content. Notice how the extra spacing between each line of text improves readability.

2. Clarifying Relationships
When observing how individuals organize visual information, Gestalt psychologists stumbled on what they call the Law of Proximity, which states that images near to each other appear similar. For example, take a look at this picture: