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!

Matt Chewning, pastor of the proposed church plant Netcast Church asked me to design a prospectus for them that would appeal to a broad range of potential donors.  I was supplied with the data for the prospectus as well as a few photographs of the area.  I decided to use a key part of the church’s vision—clear unapologetic declaration of the truth of God’s word—as inspiration for the look of the prospectus.  I used large typography, full bleed photographs and a somewhat austere look to show this grand scale/loud/clear/declaratory theme.

The result?  That remains to be seen, as the prospectus has just been sent out to the team, but so far the response is overwhelmingly positive.  Several church planting experts have said that this is the best prospectus they have ever seen.  Hopefully that will translate directly into increased giving to this wholly worthy church plant.  I am honored to have been able to be a part of helping get this ambitious project off the ground!

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.

I had fun with this one!  You can see a detailed description of the design process in my portfolio.  I wanted to tie together the current fascination with Battlestar Galactica’s remake on the Sci Fi Channel and the still-raging retro futuristic design trend.  Obviously, there’s a big James White influence here, though I used a different technique to actual create the design than James uses.  The target audience is college students at local universities.  The church that commisioned me is an inner-city postmodern church that’s growing fast with the college students it’s dedicated to reaching.

I thought this was the perfect project to again use the retro futuristic look, and I had lots of creative freedom to come up with a fitting theme.