Design Challenge and Design Ideas

The challenge was to create a unique and memorable corporate identity which showed how the company works with clients – through playful and interactive engagement. The key requirements were that the solution should be professional, clean, upbeat, and remain contemporary in style for a couple of years. As the company is highly visual in the way they work, vector illustration images were to be an integral element of the graphics. The project was an across-the-board corporate identity, which would be applied to the logo, website, team portraits, client character illustrations, methodology templates and guidebook, training/workshop presentations, business cards, letterhead, proposal template design, event infographics, social media identity, and social media posts. My design intent was ‘innovative, playful engagement.’

How the brief was fulfilled

I find the processes that my company developed to use with our clients very useful, so I applied the methodology ‘Clarityville’ to our internal work. This is a little different from traditional design briefs, as we are essentially involving the client in a deep-dive creation of the brief before beginning any visual work. Clarityville takes the client on a step-by-step visual journey. We always work together with our clients and see our outputs as a collaborative effort, involving them at many decision points along the way. This results in impactful communications, which engage successfully with their intended audience. My client was company CEO Naomi Fein. To define the brief, I determined with Naomi who the exact audience would be, profiled and prioritised them, and how she wanted them to react to what I created, and what call to action the result should be. We made a list of text content that needed to be created by other members of the company. Then we put together a general picture of the look and feel by looking at my previous design and illustration works, and gathering other examples we liked, both online and in books, to use as a starting point. We kept in mind the results of the questioning process the whole time. I explored the look and feel more after our meeting, brainstorming and drafting different examples of styles, colour palettes and typography. We always remembered that the outputs would mostly be viewed on screen. In further meetings, Naomi and I distilled the images, selecting the ones we liked best and drafting layouts. I shared with my other colleagues (graphic harvester, video manager, facilitators and administrators) and asked for their feedback to make tweaks and edits. We are a small team, and it is important that the design work for everybody. I refined and polished these in the studio.