Branding

Overview

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Previous clients:

Accomplice, Armor All, Beenu Interior Design, Chaotic Good Studios, Credit Karma, Fintelos, Gigzio, Handsome Strangers, Humade, npm javascript, Relay Ventures, SalonHQ, Scenario, Sense, The LittleBigFund, Yonder

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A brand is much more than a logo, a brand is how your audience thinks of you and much of that opinion is often outside of your control. To put your best look forward and steer the conversation, you establish a visual identity and brand guidelines which can help others to see and understand how you want to be seen.

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Challenge

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Creating a visual identity and brand guidelines out of thin air for nascent brands is often daunting for business owners. My process is to focus on personality, product distinction, and level of luxury first. To do that, I guide clients through an exploration phase first where we gather a lot of resources and inspiration, searching for a common thread or trends that align with their vision for the company. Simultaneously, we'll realize possible color palettes, textures, typography, and subject matter. We'll toy with humor vs seriousness, maximalism vs minimalism, and how much we intend to align with the tastes and trends of their target audience.

For the financial strategy company Fintelos above, we started with a mood board of agreed upon source material. A common thread we found were luxurious materials like suede, cognac, glass. We found photograph styles like beams of light, top down views of tabletops, and bright natural lighting. Typography that jumped out were mid century keyboards, digital watches, and high quality drink brands. From there, we brought in organic human elements that related to the business like inky annotations, coffee, and label makers. Take a look on Fintelos.

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For aspiration app Scenario, the audience is mid twenties or anyone facing pivotal life moments. We started with vision, mission, and archetype, then loaded those settings into The Sims 4 to see how the simulation played out on its own. From there, we extrapolated a fun and vibrant color palette, tone of voice, and showed the vibe through different objects that were relevant to the life choices you can explore within the app. See for yourself on Scenario.

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npm javascript (now a part of Github) wanted to stand out from other software services, but, while full of energy and potential for those in the know, its offering is nebulous and sometimes hard to explain. The visual identity and guidelines created focused on a fluid amorphous gak that cycles through warm hues and is only contained by an outline illustration style. See more of the brand in action, here.

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Of course we can't talk about branding without mentioning logos. Above are a small handful of logos I've created for brands. For most startups or new businesses it's often best to begin with a logotype or a simple logo and then introduce a symbol or complexity later—once your product offering and differentiation has some traction.

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Results

Once you have a fresh set of guidelines, you can point to those guidelines across all departments of the company. Adherence is important in order to maintain consistency, but knowing when to be flexible and having simple guidelines that can evolve with the growth of the company is paramount.

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