Training Ahead
Training Ahead required a brand and a website to coincide with International Assistance Dog Week at the beginning of August. Given that the target audience was largely made up of visually impaired clientele, it was imperative that the brand and website was highly accessible.
SarahCreated
Logo
Branding assets
Printed collateral
Website
About the Project
Paco Villalvilla of Training Ahead is a highly experienced assistance dog trainer. Having spent the majority of his career to date working for Guide Dogs UK, he has now developed his own offering and has centered himself in Austria to enable the entirety of Europe to access his services.
Training Ahead required a brand and a website to coincide with International Assistance Dog Week at the beginning of August. Given that the target audience was largely made up of visually impaired clientele, it was imperative that the brand and website was highly accessible.
Furthermore, there was a requirement for the website to launch in both English and Spanish to ensure ease of use for Spanish users initially (Paco is Spanish), with the intention of launching further languages in the future.
The website was also to host a blog, podcast episodes and to be maintained by Training Ahead themselves once launched.
Brand development
Working closely with Paco, we discussed potential business names which fitted the ethos of his company. We explored the availability of domain names, social media handles and researched any existing brand names which may cause confusion for users. Training Ahead was born!
Paco was keen to have a dog and person element in the logo, but wanted too stay away from a paw. He liked clean, smooth, simple designs and passed over some references he had admired previously. I gathered some further examples and designed a moodboard to align the approach for the start of the development.
I presented three different options for the logo — one of which incorporated both a dog and a person, however this was quickly discounted as being too complicated and hard to represent all scenarios.
We ensured the final design was paired with an accessible font to enable consistency between the printed brand and the digital brand. Furthermore, the blue and yellow used are accessible colours and commonly used for enhancing collateral for visually impaired.
The final concept uses a simple, clean line drawing of an alert dog wearing a coloured harness. The design conveys a happy, well-trained, obedient dog looking at a trainer. As the dog is at the heart of all services — between Training Ahead and the dog directly, and also between dog and person in need — it felt like the right choice to ensure that the dog was the hero of Training Ahead.
Website development
Training Ahead’s website was destined for good things when I got Paco on board with purchasing the .dog domain name!
Sitemap development was first on the cards, once this was approved I designed wireframes to ensure that the layout of the page was clearly explained and to ensure that the content being produced would be housed suitably on the page.
Wireframes approved, it was time to start designing the website using the brand colours, font and logo designed. At this point, Paco also took himself and a dog off to Vienna to be photographed by a professional photographer which was incredible. The photos are exceptional and really lifted the design of the site.
We took advantage of a free accessibility widget from UserWay which provided the site with its own screen reader, keyboard navigation, text amendment capabilities, contrast controls and other assistance technology such as pausing animations. Users are still able to enable their own accessibility tools if they have them installed on their device.
The website received almost 1,000 unique visitors within the first 14 days of launching — clearly a lot of people had been waiting for its launch! Visitors are predominantly based in the UK, Spain, Austria, Romania and Germany. Popular content appears to be Guide Dog training but also training of staff and volunteers within other assistance dog centres too.
If you’re interested in a niche website such as TrainingAhead.dog, please get in touch with me for a comprehensive proposal.
