East Coast Seafoods — fishmonger brand and website design

East Coast Seafoods is a brand-new independent wet fishmonger in Seaham. It sells through two counters: a fishmonger’s shop on the Kingfisher Industrial Estate, and a converted horse trailer that takes the fish counter to the market. When the owner came to SR7 there was no name on a sign yet: no logo, no brand, no photographs and no website, and the shop was opening within days.

The job was a complete identity and a website on the Growth package, with the shop as the main focus and the trailer given its own place, ready for the opening day.

Before any website, the business needed to look like a proper fishmonger. I drew three genuinely different logo directions as real vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator: a traditional fishmonger’s fascia in harbour green and gold leaf, a stencilled fish-box mark, and a modern sunrise-over-the-sea design. No generated pictures pretending to be logos, and no stock fish icon with a name underneath.

The heritage green and gold won. Bold gold EAST COAST lettering with a signwriter’s block shade, an elegant cream SEAFOODS between fine gold rules, and an EC monogram roundel with a rope border for the places a full name won’t fit. EST. 2026 is there on purpose: it reads as heritage without pretending to a history the business doesn’t have.

A fishmonger’s brand has to work in the real world, not just on a screen. The lockup was laid out as a long shop fascia with a traditional double gold border and roundels at each end, and as a trailer livery with the name across the top, gold coachlines and the roundel on the front panel. The rope border was redrawn as one continuous rope so it stays crisp from a sign board down to a sticker.

The first thing anyone wants to know about a fishmonger is whether it’s open. The homepage tells you, in UK time, the moment it loads: open now until 5pm, or closed now and opening tomorrow at 9am. Underneath, the shop and the trailer sit side by side, with the address, the opening hours and a directions link that opens the route in Google Maps. There are seven recipes too, written for a home kitchen.

The shop opened before every detail was ready, so the website was built to be honest about it. Nothing that wasn’t confirmed was put on the page: no made-up phone number, market dates or prices. Where a detail is still to come, the page says so in one plain line. Ordering ahead is switched off until the owner confirms how he wants to take orders, and every button on the site goes somewhere real. Each new detail is one line in one file, so it can be added the moment he sends it.

Until the first photographs of the shop and the trailer are taken, the site uses licensed seafood photography in the same dark, cold-light style. None of it is presented as the shop itself.

The site went live on its own domain, eastcoastseafoods.uk, with a security certificate, open to search engines, with its sitemap submitted to Google Search Console. On launch night I checked every page on a phone and a desktop: all 109 links and buttons worked, nothing scrolled sideways and there were no errors.

Lighthouse on the live homepage, 28 October 2026, phone test: performance 99, accessibility 100, best practices 100, SEO 100. On a desktop: performance, best practices and SEO 100.

East Coast Seafoods opened with a brand that looks like it has been on the high street for years, a shop sign and a trailer livery ready for the signwriter, and a website that tells customers where to find the fish and when the door is open. See it live.