I noticed this week that Etsy changed their home page layout a bit by adding a shop image and a photo of the shop owner. That inspired me to take a fresh look at the overall branding of my shop Curious Portraits which I have changed several times over the five years it has been open and I thought it was due once again for a facelift. I thought it would be nice to emphasize the Victorian theme of the portraits themselves and put the images inside black decorative frames. I can still change the images within the frames for the holidays or when I want to promote a particular new portrait. For now I went back to my sepia toned Cat Dandy which I still feel is still representative of the shop as a whole. I added in a black border that reminds me of old fashioned visiting cards and mourning stationary. I still love the mixture of script and regular type but I thought the title needed to be bolder and the rest of the text sans serif to make it slightly more readable at a small scale.
For the banner I added a soft grey ground to stand out a bit against the white page but for the bio card, which accompanies each sale, the shipping label and the business card I thought a white ground kept it more legible.
Below shows the old branding. I'd love to know if you think it was an improvement!
