Arnica Acupuncture is a clinic in Cork offering acupuncture, specialising in Japanese acupuncture and pushing the benefits of holistic, drug free therapy. Before December 2020 the clinic had never had a website. In August Maria O’Regan, owner of Arnica Clinic contacted me with her request for a new website.
Website Goals and Design Brief
The key goals of the website were to, list the therapies offered by Arnica Clinic, promote the evolving work of the clinic and share its history, and lastly, offer new perspective patients all the information they might need before contacting the clinic or booking a therapy session.
With no website history the clinic had never had the strongest online identity or presence. There was no previous branding to work from or history to evaluate, so a new website design and brand needed to be considered carefully. Before any design work started I had several calls with Maria so I could better understand her vision and ideas. From our early calls I understood she wanted a design that would be, clean and spacious, natural and warm and give nods to her inspiration and history in Japan and China, where she perfected her craft.
I decided the best way to help Maria and bring her vision to life was to provide two initial homepage designs. One more free-flowing and soft, and the other a little more rigid and corporate. This way I could get a real understanding for not only the look and feel of the design, but also of the type of features and required content she was looking for.
Homepage Design 01
The first design I produced used a fixed with to contain all the content within it. It uses a soft pastel colour palette and the use of illustrated graphics to pull all the the theme elements together. The font is a combination of Serif fonts for headings and sans serif for the body text. I reused the subtle orange circles throughout the design as this tied in nicely with the acupuncture diagrams and functional controls of sliders and carousels. I used a repeating circular Chinese pattern for the page background and tear effects to split up the sections. This visual created a sense of history and a nod to Eastern medicine and its influences to Acupuncture and natural therapies.
Homepage Design 02
The second homepage design I produced uses a full width page layout for background elements whilst still containing the page content within a fixed width. This creates a more modern feel with a clear bootstrap approach to how the page will respond. This design used new elements and features like a top bar displaying contact information and simple line icons to push the more modern theme. It utilises more call to actions, with more buttons and sections to encourage and guide a viewer into contacting the clinic.
This design definitely has a more corporate, clinical feel compared to the first homepage design. It uses new functionality and sections with more content for the viewer to digest. The idea here was to create a second design that drew on similarities to the first design, but gave a clear difference in form and some function for Maria to consider.
Final Homepage Design
After Maria had reviewed both homepages we spoke again and we discussed what ideas she liked, wanted to keep, or wanted to evolve and modify. From this discussion we finalised on some of the theme styles like the colour palette that focused on orange as a primary colours. To accompany this primary colour I used darker and lighter shades of orange as subtle accents as well as greys and blacks as a contrast to create depth and texture to the finished design and to break up the content into digestible sections.
We also landed on the final font styles for the headings and text and the use of stylised icons to be used throughout the site to create a feeling of both modern and old when combined with the hand drawn illustrations used on the homepage based on the Torii gate – A traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of a Shinto shrine. This image created both a literal and metaphorical path for the viewer to follow that takes them on a journey of self discovery and leads them to the gentle of art of acupuncture and the clinic in Cork to experience it.
Desktop Homepage Design
Mobile Homepage Design
Inner Page Design
Website Development
Once the website design had been agreed by Maria I moved onto the development stage where I built the website on WordPress using the approved designs, the Elementor page builder and the OceanWP theme. You can see the finished design and completed build of the website here.
If you would like to know more about this project or would like to discuss having something similar designed or built please, contact me here using any of the contact methods.