Identity: Making a Mark
Identity design is where my career began, and more than thirty years later, it remains one of the most rewarding parts of my practice.
At its best, an identity does considerably more than identify a business. It establishes a point of view. It creates recognition, sets expectations and provides the visual foundation for everything a brand may eventually become.
That’s what continues to make the process interesting.
A client may arrive looking for a logo, but the real conversation is usually much larger: Who are you? Who are you trying to reach? What should this business feel like? Where is it going? And what visual language will still make sense when it gets there?
The mark is only the beginning.
Typography, colour, imagery, materials, digital applications, advertising, packaging, environments and motion may all eventually need to speak the same language. Decisions made at the identity stage can influence every one of them.
That requires thinking not only about how a brand looks today, but how it can grow tomorrow.
For many of my clients, that initial identity project has become the beginning of a much longer relationship. The work expands. The applications multiply. New problems arrive. But the visual foundation established at the beginning continues to provide direction.
That longevity is one of the best measures of whether an identity is actually doing its job.
The process can take days or weeks and involve research, conversations, sketches, concepts, typography, colour studies, presentations, revisions and production testing. Depending on the project, there may be digital prototypes, PDF proofs, colour-correct press proofs, client consultations and decisions about applications that haven’t even been designed yet.
And historically, considerably more couriers.
Also coffee.
What’s here isn’t intended as a complete archive. It’s a cross-section of work created for different clients, industries and audiences, using different technologies and at very different points in my career.
Taken together, they also represent something larger: an ongoing fascination with how a remarkably small collection of shapes, letters and colours can eventually come to represent an entire organization.
Understand what matters. Find what distinguishes it. Reduce it to something clear. Then build a visual language strong enough to carry everything that comes next.
After more than thirty years, I still find that process fascinating.
And I still get a considerable kick out of seeing something I designed out there in the world, doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Have a project, an idea, a question, or an interesting problem that refuses to behave? Something that needs making, fixing, rethinking, photographing, designing, or otherwise coalescing into existence? Make contact. I can’t promise to say yes, but I can promise to have an opinion.