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!

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.

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.

As you will see through this series, having a good knowlege of your client does not guarantee a quick design solution.For this client, I wanted to emphasize the community and global aspects of their mission without negating either side.  It’s a fine line to walk – community vs. ubiquity, but I set out toward that end with the logo comps in my previous post.  I began with the concept of the Trinity – the theological term that describes how God is one in His nature, but three in person.  It’s a mind trip, to be sure, but God is completely and eternally unified and is a single entity, yet He is also eternally revealed in three distinct persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit).  As you can see, this is the perfect reference point for an organization that seeks to empower it’s members to be unique, singular, and different from each other, yet simultaneously unified under a set of common goals and values.  A community of unified individuals.  It’s quite a wonderful paradox, just like the Trinity.

Trinity Symbol (Triquetra)

So, I began with the Trinity symbol: three distinct lobes that are connected to form a single unit.  Kind of like a moebius strip.  The second inspiration for my first designs was the concept of growth and newness.  Therefore, I created a design that referenced plant forms, without overstating the “leafiness” of the forms.  I chose Helvetica as the wordmark because of it’s ubiquity and immediacy to the viewer, also because it is used internationally and can bear the weight of a large organization.  The “international” wordmark uses Museo, and great new semi-slab serif typeface from Jos Buivenga.  Museo is also an international font, and retains a bit of the classical feel of slab serifs, but is distinctly new, while Helvetica carries an age, despite the fact that it’s a sans serif.  I’ll attach the logo, in case you haven’t read my previous post:

First Logo Comp

As you can see, I also worked a cross into the negative space of the logomark, as a response to one of the main tenets of Grace Churches’ mission is that it’s members are unified by way of the cross of Christ.  The response to this logo was generally positive, but it wasn’t right for them, and reminded some of the leadership of Christmas poinsettias.  Ha!  What’s funny is that I didn’t see that coming!  As soon as the client said it, I chuckled and now that’s all I can see when I look at it.  The human brain is a funny thing.

Now onto the image at the top of this post.  After the first logo’s rejection, I still wanted to stick to the organic idea, and move into an idea I had of a spirograph – overlapping shapes that create a new shape at their intersection.  The images in the graphic at the top of this post are the result of some expirimentation toward that end.  The problem with them is I was still aiming at too young of a target crowd.  Those images work on their own, but when tied to Grace Churches International, they stop working because they don’t carry enough professionalism.  The Grace Churches leadership opperates with a strong work ethic, and these new logo ideas didn’t show that.

Tune in next time to see the next step – still clinging to some youthfulness, but with less pizzaz…

The site serves two functions: to provide a store front to sell their products (both food and non-food items), and to give their customers lots of articles to read.  At first, I organized the site via two menus: Explore Coffee and Buy Coffee.  Since they used my CMS service, they began writing up all the “Explore” articles during development while I set up the store.  They ended up not using the simplified two menu system, opting for a less-organized approach.  To solve the usability issues of having unclear navigation, I added a section to the top of each page with two custom graphics that link to either the main Explore section, or to the Store Front.

The look of the site is based on the corporate identity that I created for the Captain’s Coffee, including the logo, logotype, color scheme and the overall “feel” of the site.

Because of the CMS service, the business’ employess and owners can change anything on the site that they like.  They told me multiple times that they love the way they are able to update the site, including all the store’s products.  They had been using an ecommerce solution called MonsterCommerce, provided by Network Solutions.  It’s a rather cumbersome process to get anything done on a MonsterCommerce site when compared with the system I give my customers.

So far, the feedback from both my client and their customers has been glowing!  Their older customers find the site intuitive and easy to navigate, and their younger customers enjoy the updated look and the security of the integrated credit card payments with SSL encryption.

Have a look and let me know what you think!

After:

A brief, focused history of Mountain Dew’s can designs. I’m not including varieties, such as Code Red, Live Wire, Sport, Diet, promotional designs or extra large designs. The first ever can designed for Mountain Dew, before it was owned by Pepsi:

And, here’s the redesigns of that product package until 2009, again not including the intentional limited-run items.

The above is my all-time favorite, following the original design.

I find it fascinating to view them lined up like this.  You can see a definite progression of the imagery.  One of the immediate things I noticed was the way the logotype becomes more slanted through time.  The first design was very much straight, hand-placed type.  As time went by, the name become more and more slanted until now when it’s probably at a 45 degree angle.  That’s really steep!  I think the second can looks more like a beer can than a soft drink can.

My favorite has to be the original design. I love how it directly references it’s moonshine heritage.  For those who don’t know, “Mountain Dew” originally was a slang term for illegally-distilled alcohol, also known as “Moonshine” that was created in the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia.  The original Mountain Dew softdrink was created by two bar keepers as a beer chaser and moonshine mixture to sweeten mixed drinks.

The designs definitely got boring during the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s.  It seems that during the 1990′s, Pepsico started to target a younger audience with some intentionality, which can be seen in my love of the can that I mentioned above.  That can design gives me good memories, directly associated with good design and a good product.  Will the new design be able to elicit the same reaction from today’s clientele?  That remains to be seen, but I would guess the answer is no.

You’ve probably noticed at your local grocery store or gas station that Pepsico has come out with a new corporate identity.  It’s clearly an attempt at an evolutionary (vs. revolutionary) change, with a similar color palette and predominantly blue background on the flagship product, Pepsi.  I think it’s a bad identity.  Find out why after the jump.

A logo refresh, and certainly a new corporate identity should push a company forward into it’s growing vision.  Branding should reflect where a company will be in ten years, and if properly done, will propel the company into that vision.  It should never be done to fit in better with “the crowd” or to better adhere to a current design trend.  Here’s the first thing that pops into most people’s minds when they view these:

“So Pepsi voted for Obama?”  At which point the Pepsi executives would say, “No, that’s not the Obama logo – it’s a stylized smiley face!  Isn’t that fun?”  Well, it sure doesn’t look like a smile to me, and I’m all about symbolism and implied meanings.  It looks like a bad print job of the old Pepsi logo.

There’s a lot that’s bad about this, from the nauseating “e” in “pepsi”, to the clinical, cold layout, to the fact that it looks like the packaging for an mp3 player more than a food product.  Plus, the logo changes depending on the drink!  Come on, guys!  That aspect seems to have been an afterthought, since with the pepsi max can, the logo has a much larger “grin”, depicting the higher caffeine amount in the drink, but the rest of the pepsi max can is bland, boring, grey, clinical and sterile.  If you’re going to change the logo to depict a more exciting customer experience, you have to follow through with the entire package – which they have not done.

This new look seeks to set itself apart from the competition, which it does indeed.  I’ll give them that: they stick out like a sore thumb, or like a medical appliance in the frozen foods section.

Feel free to comment, especially if you disagree with me.  I know there are mixed opinions on this out there.

I developed the new logo, typography choices, color scheme and overall brand image.  The collateral produced included new business cards, business card magnets, invoices and a new web site.

The blog is specially crafted to appeal to women, as Wellspring is targeted exclusively at women.  The use of organic, swirling forms, a paper-like background, and a purposeful lack of “Read More” links were all elements that we put into the site for that reason.

I created the Wellspring logo and corporate identity a few months before we created the site.  I also helped Wellspring by setting up their hosting service and registering their domain name.

ZCC is a company that first and foremost is all about quality.  If they had to choose between doing work that was of the utmost quality versus doing work that wasn’t as good, but getting more business, they would always choose losing business but keeping quality high.

I created a new identity for them, with a modified, realigned logo and typography choices, solidified color scheme and a new website.