Rear of the Business Card

Tammy Crowley-Deloatch owns and operates a family fitness center in Roanoke Rapids, NC called Crowley’s Fitness Center.  She recently got married, and has had some other significant life changes happen. She found herself re-examining her business and realized that while she had changed, the business had not.  She began looking for a way to move the business forward and soon discovered the concept of branding: defining a business’ vision, values, mission, corporate culture, target demographic, projected size, customer experience—then translating those ideas into the visual language.

From the outset, Tammy wanted to have her new brand communicate fun, action, excitement, a family atmosphere, wholistic fitness (mind, body, soul). She also felt strongly that in the same way she was experiencing a personal renaissance, she wanted her customers to see themselves as starting fresh, getting renewed hope to keep trying to reach goals. In short, Tammy is living in a “new day” everyday and wants her customers to do the same.  She didn’t have a name for the business, but she wanted to make sure that she maintained a personal connection to her clients.

I was able to come up with a new name for her business, “New Day Fitness” with the almost-always-accompanying “with Tammy Crowley-Deloatch.”  The guy jumping off the logo was a natural extension of the idea of “jumping into fitness” and communicates excitement and life.  I chose a color palate of blue/orange because orange is such a strong psychological color and is helpful for inspiring people to be active.  Blue is opposite orange on the color wheel, so when used together it provides visual excitement and grabs attention.  Blue also helps to communicate the trustworthiness, experience and knowledge of Tammy.  The overlapping colors behind the letters suggest that there’s fun things going on “inside”—inside the fitness center, and inside the customers.

I chose Myriad Pro Black Italic & Italic for the logo name because Myriad in its Italic settings has such a great playfulness, while balanced with a clean, modern, respectable stance.  You’d never know that Myriad Roman/Semibold is Apple, Inc.’s font of choice! I contrasted Myriad Italic with Chaparral Pro Italic because both typefaces are designed by Carol Twomby, so they both have similar messages. Chaparral is respectable and almost serious, but has all these great little touches of character and fun. It walks a line between whimsy and seriousness that when paired with Myriad Italic really fits the bill.

Applications are being done ahead of a January 2011 launch, including business cards, new brochures for prospective clients, exterior signage, tee shirts for the staff and eventually a web presence.

So far everyone’s happy and excited about the new brand!  It’s always a great feeling to hear a client be so excited about your work. Tammy immediately loved the name I suggested, and felt that the logo really fit her vision perfectly.  I’m looking forward to seeing how New Day Fitness increases and grows over the years.  Who knows, maybe you’ll start seeing New Day Fitness franchises popping up all over the country!

This is the first product from a new company, Satisfy Your Soul.  They are two professional chefs in Burlington, NC who use all natural, locally-sourced ingredients to create unique recipes inspired by their worldwide travels.  This Apple Chutney is inspired by the authentic flavors of India, and uses Winesap apples from the 2010 North Carolina apple harvest.  The curry blend is unique to the Satisfy Your Soul chefs.

They asked me to take their vision for authentic international flavors, chef-created recipes & locally sourced ingredients and create a label design that would communicate all of that.

We also did all the copywriting for this. Jessica came up with a Story Panel that describes the chefs’ inspiration.

Photography by Kevin Lee of Studio Place, Inc. You can reach him at (336)854-8828.

The brand needed to be visually loud without being garish, and needed to have an honest, down-to-earth sensibility about it. I used a high-contrast color scheme, stamped text, a megaphone with blast rays and an overall grunge treatment as tools to develop the brand.

Right off the bat, I created two tee shirt designs for the campaign: heather grey American Apparel cotton crew neck short sleeve shirts. Each uses four colors: the guys uses black/white/red, and the girls version uses purple/pink/white.

I also created a one-page website which currently is used as a landing page which then points to the main GPCC website. This will be developed further in the future as this new program grows. In addition, I purchased the makeupyourownmind.org domain name, and GPCC has buyers negotiating for the variant domains such as .com and .net.

I used a gradient on a almost-neutral gray background to reference the spotlighting employed in the gallery and the fonts I chose are all created by Jos Buivenga of Exljbris, a Dutch typography company.  The “A” is set in Museo 900 and the brand’s fonts are Fontin Sans.

You can visit the Affinity Gallery website here.

In the end, the favorite version of my designs was the one using good ol’ Helvetica. I usually steer away from using Helvetica too much, as it is so ubiquitous, but in this case it kept enough of an air of seriousness that it benefited this particular execution beautifully.

I’ve attached here three versions of the logo, showing it in various usage.

I started with the mighty Jos Buivenga’s Museo Sans font for the precision and geometric properties, then manipulated it until it could be used as a graffiti stencil. Then I distressed it further, adding paint splatters and an overspray boundary until the client was happy with the amount of grunge.  I initially used a much cleaner version where just the “A!” was stenciled, but the client really wanted some serious grunge, so I poured it on thick!

The identity system is built around the idea of graffiti.  The “A!” can be used separately from the logo in various applications, as shown in some production comps I threw together:

Digital comp of the Awaken logo in stencil format

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church website design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design, exterior large format signage

Over the course of two years, the vision has been further refined, and because KCC is essentially a “replant” of a church, the “culture” of the church has changed drastically over two years.  I helped redesign the interior of the church, bringing in modern colors and lighting to the space, and the church is now doing lots of outreach.  In addition, the style of the meetings has changed to a cutting edge experience.  It became clear to me that my 2007 identity had quickly become outdated.  Normally a brand/identity will last much longer than two years, but in special cases, an identity can become outdated if the vision, mission, values or corporate culture of the organization change in large measure.  In KCC’s case, the corporate culture changed enough to cause a disconnect with the identity.  What KCC needed was not a redesign; rather a realign was the best option because the core vision and values had not changed; just the atmosphere of the church.

I kept the basic premise of the brand intact, but updated the typography, adjusted the color scheme and proportions to show a more cutting-edge, modern aesthetic, along with more aggression.  KCC is a church with a lot of forward motion, so the new identity had to reflect that.

The logotype was originally Myriad Pro with Garamond Premier Pro as the subtitle.  They had been chosen for a clean-but-creative look.  For the realigned identity, I chose Bree Extra Bold Oblique for the title and Zapatista for the subtitle.  Bree is a typeface with a pleasing upright-italic feel that exhibits lots of creative flair—KCC has lots of artists and a public art gallery in its building—and Zapatista is an aggressive grungy typewriter font.  I proportioned everything inside the Golden Ratio (a.k.a. Divine Ratio) to show a sense of order amid all the gutteral grunge treatments.  I also removed the vintage surround of the identity to demonstrate the shift from history to future.

My 2007 (top) and 2009 (bottom) logos

The realigned identity is being implemented slowly, as needs arise. This is done to keep costs down for this [essentially] young church.

I also set up a small blog site to help those involved begin to build some internet buzz around the event and created a Flickr account for pre-production photos.  To help the artists and coordinators, I wrote a series of “How To” emails designed to help everyone get past some fears about blogging.  It’s interesting to me how many people are hesitant to blog because they feel that their writing won’t be appreciated, so I took some time to help them catch the vision for what a blog can do, and they really are having fun with it!  It’s been great to see a group of people step outside of their comfort zones, and flourish because of it.

Some special functionality that I built into the site includes a simple registration page that tracks all the registration information, and links to the conference sponsor’s PayPal account.  I also set up Twitter integration and did all the copy writing on the site (besides the blog posts).  In addition, I took care of registering the domain name, opening up a hosting account, and installing the blogging software.