OCEAVEDA

An ayurvedic practitioner based near Orléans, who consults over video and gives massages on site. Two activities, two ways of booking, and the same person behind both.

A visual identity already existed, built up over time through her social media posts. It was not formalised anywhere, but it was coherent and her clients recognised it. Destroying it to start from a blank page would have been a mistake.

We began by sampling her palette pixel by pixel from her own images, rather than proposing colours of our choosing. Sage green, deep olive, midnight green, ivory, cream, olive gold: they are her colours, taken from her work and not invented.

Then, at Jordan's request and before the framing was even complete, we produced three competing home pages rather than a single proposal. An independent practitioner cannot picture herself in a written description, she pictures herself in a page she can look at.

She chose direction A, dark and editorial, on 31 August 2026. The choice was quick precisely because it was made on real things and not on adjectives.

Three complete directions is three times the work of one. It is a cost we take on when the client is a single person whose image is the product: in that case, choosing the wrong direction costs far more than producing three.

Typography became structural during the project, for a precise reason: the logo is the word OCEAVEDA set in type. Choosing the typeface is therefore not a setting, it is choosing the logo. Nine options were worked up to settle it.

Online booking runs on a free tool rather than a paid solution. For a sole trader, a subscription line avoided is a useful decision, and the tool we picked does the job.

The site responds in 0.12 seconds, measured on 8 September 2026: the fastest of the four projects shown here.

But the main change is elsewhere. An independent practitioner lives on the trust she inspires before the first appointment. A site coherent with what her clients already see in her posts removes the dissonance, and that continuity is worth more than any written argument.

Online booking changes the rest: it removes the back-and-forth messages to find a slot, which is the main reason people give up on this kind of business.

The project is being built. We will publish usage figures when the site is live and those figures exist.

An unusual request to begin with: produce three competing home pages before the framing was even finished, so the client could picture herself. That runs against our usual method, where framing comes before design.

The decision turned out to be right in this particular context. An independent practitioner whose image is the product cannot picture herself in a written description. She decided within days on real things, where classic framing would have produced back-and-forth over words.

Four structural decisions followed: the art direction, the town to attach the business to, the booking tool, and the typography. Three were settled quickly. The fourth took work of its own.

The OCEAVEDA logo is the brand name, set in type. There is no symbol beside it. The consequence is direct and it was not anticipated: choosing the typeface is not settling a layout detail, it is drawing the logo.

So we took that decision out of the normal flow of the project and produced a sheet of nine typographic options, shown side by side on the word itself rather than on sample text. That is the only way to judge: a typeface that is elegant in a paragraph can be unreadable at large size across seven letters.

That detour cost time. It avoids the situation we often see with sole traders: an identity chosen by default, which has to be redone eighteen months later when the business takes shape.

The palette followed the same logic. Rather than proposing colours, we took hers pixel by pixel from her own posts. The site is therefore the continuation of what her clients already see, not a break with it.