03. case study: victoria vet clinics
In 2016, Victoria Veterinary Clinics - a chain of veterinary hospitals in Hong Kong - reached out to update their brand with a new brand identity, logo, shopfront, banner ads and website.
They were about to move their headquarters to a new shop, but were still using the same designs from when they founded in 1992. Despite being by far the most well-equipped and experienced veterinary hospital in the area, they found that their branding did not reflect this at all and was instead sending younger clientele elsewhere.
To improve this business problem, I created a series of design assets to modernise the VVC brand.
The first task was to update the colour palette. While blue was heavily associated with their brand, that shade of 90’s fluro teal wasn’t doing it anymore. We established a darker, muted blue-teal tone to be used consistently across all platforms for a sense of professionalism that also stood out from the pack.
Then, we got to work updating the logo above. We had to find a way to incorporate the V their customers knew them for, include both English and Chinese in the logo intself, and still remain recognisable as the same Victoria Vet Clinics. After a period of research, I landed on the the reference of the iconic Volkswagen logo, and used variation of line weights within the same logo to straddle a certain boldness and elegance.
Often with bilingual companies, incorporating the name into the logo can get tricky, and results in a large number of variations on the logo, each with different wording. By creating a sunset style shape with spacing for wording beneath, this allowed us to include both the English and Chinese name of the clinics within the shape, creating a single plug-and-play vector logo that could be used as is, anywhere in their branding.
We also transitioned VVC from serif to sans-serif, selecting new English and Chinese fonts that were complementary to each other.
The next task was to create a website that allowed the owners web autonomy. Their previous provider was charging thousands a year by requiring payment every time they needed something changed.
After working through the website wireframe together with VVC, I built this mobile-responsive website, and programmed in a dual language functionality (which was not available as plugin at the time). I walked the owners through the website, which they have since mostly maintained themselves completely autonomously for 8 years ongoing.
As a final touch, we created a Google Business listing with live opening hours and FAQs, as well as a bilingual SEO strategy that we applied to the website and all subsequent digital advertisements.
Later on, VVC reached out again to create a series of minibus ads and a shopfront design.
This brand identity and digital presence was created for VVC in 2016, which they have successfully continued to use unchanged for 8 years ongoing.