Holmes Homes Floor Plan Redesign
Brief
Holmes Homes, a homebuilder located just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, wanted to update the design of their existing static floor plans. Their current style was very dated, hard to read online, and did not appeal to their target demographic of young, first-time home buyers.
The client liked the look of their interactive floor plans and asked if we could match the style.
Client:
Holmes Homes for BDX Solutions
Website:
Skills:
art direction, case study, illustration, project management
Assessing Client Needs
The style of the client’s interactive floor plan was a dramatic improvement over their current style — cleaner, easier to read, better overall color scheme, and it matched the branding/design aesthetic of the builder’s website and marketing collateral.
I did notice that the color scheme conflicted with the unofficial industry standards. The interior flooring was shown in grey, which is typically a color used to indicate concrete garage floors, porches, patios, and other exterior surfaces. Was this a deliberate request from the client or an artistic choice made by the artist who created the interactive plan?
I knew the client’s redesign was intended to improve the quality of the plans, but I didn’t want to conflict with an established brand standard. I made sure to bring this up during my project initiation call to determine what the highest priorities with this project were for the client and where I could made recommendations for improvement.
The client didn’t realize the requested color scheme could be confusing to potential buyers and was open to other color schemes “as long as the final result was an overall improvement to the floor plan”. While discussing the color scheme, I also made a suggestion to keep the colored counters and plumbing from the original design, which the client agreed was a good recommendation and requested I include in the redesign as well.
The original floor plan style.
Proposed New Design
In my proposed version of the new design, I removed the tile pattern that was used in the original style. Textures and patterns do not work well on interactive floor plan designs and I knew the client would ultimately want to convert these static plans to interactive. I selected a cleaner, sans-serif font that would read well both on screen and in print.
I did not use the exact same colors from the interactive plan, but used these colors as a starting point for the final scheme to ensure the colors were similar but remained cohesive when adding the blue and brown. I also opted to use the traditional color selections of grey for concrete and yellow for interiors.
Alternate Schemes
I presented the requested grey-interior flooring color scheme as an “alternate color scheme” to the client — the “Cabo” scheme shown here — along with two other options.
The client LOVED my design choices and agreed their version was not as successful.
Conclusions
This project was extremely successful. I was able to make recommendations that improved upon the client’s initial brief, which resulted in a stronger overall product that better executed the client’s needs.
Because I had an established relationship with the client, I felt comfortable making design recommendations based on my design experience and knowledge of graphics in the home building industry. Had I not had a strong, established relationship with this client, I would have spent more time on the project initiation step by providing examples of existing floor plans to reinforce my recommendations and help illustrate why these changes would add value to the project for the client.
As a result of how happy the client was with the proposed redesign for their floor plans, Holmes Homes chose to make BDX their exclusive vendor for all floor plan and site map graphics.
To capitalize on the positive momentum created through this successful project and related ongoing projects, I coordinated with the assigned sales team member for this region to help them create a long-term plan to work on bringing this builder all-in with BDX on all of their digital marketing products.
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