Real Estate Branding + Website Design
Portland, OR natives at Ford Properties are exactly what you see when you look up “Customers First” in the dictionary. They take the time to ensure their customers are put first and are comfortable during every step of the process they take together. The Ford’s needed branding that showed that they’re not the stuffy usual sort of business you deal with when you work with Real Estate agents.
Real Estate Brand Development
Ford Properties Buzz Words
Professional Consultative Authentic
The Ford Properties team are exactly who you see when you look up “Customers First” in the dictionary. They take the time to ensure their customers are put first and are comfortable during every step of the process they take together. Ford Properties needed branding that showed that they’re not the stuffy usual sort of business you deal with when you work with Real Estate agents.
The brand build out included logo design, secondary logo, sub-mark, hand-drawn style business icons, the website design, development and copywriting.
Logo Concept
We started with a design mood board that reflected Ford Properties’ desire for a modern badge style logo. Eventually though we edged away from that design. Instead we opted for an even more simple design with a bridge and the brand name and defining features.
The bridge logo design is symbolic and represents a few different aspects of the business.
First, Portland is known as the city of bridges. The idea of using a bridge as part of the logo to identify Ford Properties process of bridging the gap from a desire to buy or sell a house, to realizing that goal.
There were plenty of bridges to choose from in Portland to represent that process of bridging the gap from start to finish. In the end we chose to graphically represent the Tilikum bridge.
Tilikum is a Chinook jargon word meaning people, tribe, or family. The meaning is perfect, since Ford Properties is genuinely dedicated to each of their clients, working close with each of them and coming together to reach clients’ real estate goals. It’s also interesting that Tilikum is a jargon word, and not a formal one. People generally use jargon only in the company of people they are comfortable with. Ford Properties strives to make people feel comfortable by putting their clients’ needs first and taking on more of a consulting role (compared to a sales-y role) throughout the process.
Lastly, the Tilikum bridge is the most modern looking bridge in Portland. This aspect aligns with the fact that Ford Properties is committed to using the most cutting edge resources to deliver the best results for their clientele.
Words from the client:
“It’s perfect. I’m so juiced! It looks amazing! Straight jubilation over here.”
— Matt Ford, Owner & Founder
Yep. That’s the kind of feedback we live for. #peoplepleasers
After developing the branding along with hand-drawn styled graphics to further produce the bold, genuine, and authentic brand vibe, At First Sight Creative set to organizing their website and creating copy that would help establish themselves as thought-leaders in their industry.
Many of the competitors we looked at merely talked about their family and their abilities as real estate agents. We decided to take our site viewers a step further and tell them exactly how the process of buying or selling real estate with Ford Properties works.
brand guide development
business card design
website home page design and copywriting
the process page design and copywriting