Clockwork Acorn is a South African game development studio founded in 2014 that focuses on making timeless games. We foster a fully-remote team dedicated to our shared mission of being a force for good in the world.
Clockwork Acorn’s brand identity, including our website, has existed basically unchanged since it was originally put together a decade ago in our garage-startup days. It is in need of a rework to bring it in-line with modern standards, and to best reflect the organisation we are striving to build.
To that end we are seeking a professional to help us with brand design and web development. We want you to take charge of reworking our brand identity and associated collateral – most importantly our company website.
Ideally we are seeking a single partner to handle both the design and development of the website, but we will also consider working with two separate specialists.
Project Deliverables
This project is split into two sets of deliverables: a brand redesign, followed by the development of our new website.
Deliverable 1 – Company Brand Rework
The initial block of work deals with reworking our brand identity and associated essential collateral. To this end we are seeking:
- A redesign of our company logo
- Incl. all common use case variants (display size, wordmarks, background colour, etc.)
- Must be delivered in vector format (ideally SVG)
- Other nice-to-have’s:
- Common web and store banner variants
- Common splash screen variants
- A short easy-to-reference style guide for internal use that can help us maintain consistency on our brand essentials. Our ideal solution will equip us with the building blocks and brand design principles we need to create a flexible, coherent design system over time:
- Colour palette
- Fonts and iconography
- Nice-to-have’s we also might want to explore:
- Business cards
- Writing / voice guide
Deliverable 2 – Website Development
The second set of deliverables we require is the production of a new deployable company website that we can use for the foreseeable future. We imagine this to be a two step approach:
- Mockups of the proposed design we can review and iterate on with you.
- Delivery of a new website in the form of a custom WordPress theme and collaborate with us on any required content changes.
Technical Requirements
- Website should be compatible with all modern web browsers on desktop and mobile.
- Website design/layout should be responsive to mobile devices.
- Deliver an easy-to-use and technically-robust WordPress theme that is easy to update and maintain.
Design Requirements
- Modern design reflective of our company, its culture and the games we make.
- Timeless design, like our games, our website should appeal to people far into the future.
- Playful and fun — we make games after all.
Website Target Audience
We see our website’s target audience as:
- Players
- Interested in our released games.
- Seeing our prototypes or following our development efforts.
- Looking to join our community spaces.
- People interested in the game industry
- Read our blog, sign up for our newsletter, or follow our socials.
- People looking for full-time employment or intern opportunities.
- Potential development partners
- Clients looking for someone to consult or develop a product.
- Publishers and Platforms looking for games to publish.
- Specialist service providers (such as sound designers, QA and testing, localisation).
- Game industry journalists and other press
- Looking for information about us and our games.
- Who want to reach out to us.
Proposed Top-level Nav
Below is a high-level conceptualisation of how we imagine the top-level nav, with some notes on the content there. While it should serve to help you understand our thinking, please feel free to propose changes if you feel it is warranted. We think a more extensive sitemap and misc links can be included in the footer.
- Home
- Clear welcome blurb
- Games front and center
- Newsletter, community and social links.
- Games
- List of full games and some prototypes
- Dedicated page per game
- About
- Company culture & approach to game development
- Work with Us
- Careers
- Why work with us?
- Open jobs
- Services
- Client Services and Consulting
- Careers
- Contact
Proposal Requirements
If you are interested in this work, please provide us with a high-level proposal that includes:
- Who you are – the people involved, your expertise, a link to your website and any relevant work or case studies we can look at.
- The work you are interested in – the brand redesign, the website development, both?
- Cost and time estimates – a high level idea of how long this work will take you with key milestones, and how much it will cost us.
- Anything else you deem relevant.
We’ll consider applications until 30 June 2024 although we might close this early if we find the right partner.
Other Considerations
We’re open to suggestions. We know we’re not experts on brand and web development. We have developed this RFP document as our best attempt at representing our needs as we understand them, but we are happy to hear alternatives and better approaches.
We’re developers and designers too. We have extensive internal technical and design expertise, and as such can help in the implementation of these deliverables if need be. Ideally though we want to offload as much labour as possible in this process.
Cost sensitive. While we understand the need for realistic budgets, we are a small business and we’d appreciate any attempts to keep the cost of this project to a minimum. Feel free to talk to us if some of our requirements or considerations add a lot of cost to this project. We are open to rethinking our needs, especially on nice-to-haves and non-essentials.
Flexible timeline. While this work is essential to us, and we want it done soon, we are open to a flexible schedule for the right partner.
Useful References
- Company Website – you’re already here!
- Team Handbook – why we do what we do, and how we do it
- Company Press Kit – outdated
- Clockwork Acorn Discord
- Some game industry websites we think are good references:
Contact Information
Submissions are closed.
