Leah Mermelstein Consulting
Leah Mermelstein is a leading literacy expert with a full suite of services she provides to schools and teachers. But without a logo, branding or a fully functional website, she was struggling to market herself and to grow her business.
Leah Mermelstein is an entrepreneur with a thriving literacy consulting business and came to me full of ideas for how to brand her business in preparation for expanding to sell her resources. I needed to cull through her ideas and all the marketing and promotional copy she’d written on her own to create a full brand suite and a website that reflected her business and her vision.
Leah also had plans to market and sell literacy tools to teachers and schools through her website, so I needed to make sure her site was set up accordingly.
Finally, I was tasked with transposing Leah’s literacy tools (64 + page guides) from Microsoft Word into beautifully designed, on brand pdfs that could be easily utilized by her clients.
We tackled the logo and brand suite first and I designed everything considering Leah’s long-term goals of building a website and marketing materials. Leah wanted a logo that included her name, which has equity in her industry, but that also included “LMC” in hopes of transitioning to just the initials in the future. She loved the three-block design and we agreed the three squares could go on to represent her trade-mark post-its as a graphic device in all marketing materials. Both the fonts and the color palette I chose are professional and classic but also skew slightly playful and youthful as a nod to the K-6th grade students her services are targeted towards.
Once the branding was set, I moved on to the website which followed a traditional format and user flow but incorporated a notepaper background and the post-it graphic to make it unique. Although Leah provided a full copy deck, we spent a lot of time culling it down and revising it to fit in a website. I also used Squarespace’ selling platform to build a shop for the literacy tools available to purchase and download.
Next, I redesigned Leah’s literacy tools from Microsoft Word into photoshop, complete with graphics, colors and font variations that were on brand and enhanced the content. This included two 64+ page tool kits and 34 pages of mentor texts. Once the layouts were complete, we were able to integrate them into the site and start selling.
Lastly Leah wanted to market her new tools to increase visibility and generate sales. Using Squarespace’s email marketing campaign platform, I designed and sent a series of emails to leads announcing the new tools and encouraging sales. I also created social media campaigns so Leah could launch and market the tools on her channels with consistent messaging and branding.