Fresh & Folksy Branding and Squarespace Website for Voiceover Artist & Coach
Fablehound
Voiceover Artist & Coach for Voiceover Actors
Emily Wold is a voiceover artist and coach for voiceover actors who was looking to make her branding and website match the high quality of her work.
Working from her home studio in Little Rock, Arkansas, Emily had already established herself as an industry leader, regularly voicing national advertising campaigns for top brands like Amazon, Dunkin’, Frito Lay, Kelloggs and Meta. She also launched a coaching program last year to help rising voiceover actors learn the skills necessary to run successful creative businesses.
Emily was confident in her brand’s fresh, folksy, independent voice and personality, which came through so clearly via her Instagram reels. (Just watch one of her reels of straight-talk advice for VO artists and you’ll immediately want to work with her!) Yet, her DIY website lacked the same personality and polish. She was ready for her online presence to match her industry leader reality.
www.fablehound.com
Establishing Her Industry Leader Status Through a Strong Brand Foundation
Creating a strong brand foundation was the first step towards helping Emily shine online as an industry leader.
In our first call, Emily shared how she wanted her brand to reflect who she is in and out of the sound booth. As a former tour/summer theater actor, Emily had spent years hustling and moving from gig to gig. Voiceover acting gave her freedom and independence to live the life she wanted — homesteading in her Arkansas hometown and road-tripping in her custom-designed Fablebus mobile recording studio. It was important to her that her brand reflected her lifestyle while also reinforcing her business savvy and expertise as a voiceover artist. Emily also wanted to ensure her brand stood out from the voiceover actor crowd, eschewing the overused microphone imagery and cheesy descriptors in favor of visuals and a conversational voice that invites potential clients into her creative world.
Based on how we want the brand to feel — fresh and folksy with a strong sense of ambition and independence — we decided that her visuals should take inspiration from retro country Americana. All country with a dash of Western, we crafted her brand design around whimsical illustrations, nostalgic touches, warm colors, and modern fonts for a timeless, handcrafted charm.
Photography Creative Direction
A custom brand photoshoot is one of the best investments you can make in your brand, providing you with a variety of photos showing your work and your brand’s personality that you can use for your website, social media, and other marketing materials. There is no better way to communicate who you are than through quality brand photography.
I worked with Emily to find the amazing photographers at Novo Studio to give ensure her custom photos had the homey quality we envisioned for her brand. They shot on-site at her homestead, capturing portraits, lifestyle and voiceover work photos to emphasize the personality of the Fablehound brand.
Refreshed Logo, Color Palette & Fonts
When Emily founded her company in 2020, she selected a Western-style font for her logo. We refreshed her logo with a simplified version of that font. We added retro touches, including a whimsical illustration of the cowboy boot, the business establishment date, and additional information about her business using a font inspired by vintage signs.
We also crafted a font palette that complements the retro feeling of the logo and ensures your brand shows off its fresh and folksy personality. The heading font is a modern slab serif font that offers versatility and legibility in multiple sizes. The body font is a clean sans-serif font selected for its rounder nature and readability. The accent font used in the subhead and buttons is the same as the secondary vintage-inspired font from the logo.
We rounded out the visual branding with a color palette that evokes cowgirl spirit. The dusty roses in the palette provide a vintage foundation with a nod toward old desert towns. A "root beer" brown grounds the palette, communicating the reliability and confidence you bring to your work. Accent colors in ochre yellow and deep green reflect nature, offering ambition, optimism and growth as part of the brand's color palette.
A brand style guide is an essential resource for any business. It provides details on the visual elements of your branding, including the logo, fonts, colors and icons, that can help your brand feel professional and cohesive.
“My favorite part of our work together was the excellent branding content (I didn't expect that part of Melanie's service to be as strong as it is - what an incredible bonus that was for me) & the style guide. Two incredible resources that I still refer to regularly.”
— Emily Wold, voiceover artist & Coach for voiceover actors
Showcasing Industry Leader Expertise with a Thoughtfully-Designed Website & Online Portfolio
Once we had the brand foundation in place, we started working on the new Fablehound website. Our focus was on highlighting the excellent work in Emily’s portfolio, as well as sharing the elements of her work that make her a go-to voiceover artist for major brands.
As a voiceover artist, we needed to prominently feature Emily’s commercial work on the home page and with an extensive portfolio. We emphasized her industry-leading chops on the home page by incorporating both a scrolling logo bar with the national brands she’s worked with and a section highlighting top voiceover audio clips. For her portfolio page, I created a video library that linked to the completed commercials on YouTube, making it easy for Emily to update her portfolio as she booked new projects.
Equally crucial for showing Emily’s expertise was the design of her service pages. As a voiceover artist and coach, she serves two very different audiences. We crafted each page to address the concerns of each client type, incorporating tailored content that spoke to pain points and Emily’s approach — backed up by examples of her work and testimonials.
By combining thoughtful visual branding with content showcasing Emily’s expertise, the result is a website befitting the industry leader that Emily is.
“My website now looks like my brand. What's more, it looks like the website of someone who is a leader in their industry. It also has room for growth & expansion. I feel confident about that growth & expansion because of all the tools that come as part of working with Melanie. I've now booked clients directly from my website. My website traffic has increased. I've received glowing reviews from folks who have explored the new site — and perhaps most poignantly, I now feel so enthusiastic & proud to direct folks to my site.”
— Emily Wold, voiceover artist & Coach for voiceover actors