The Year in New Brand Pictures: 2007 Highlights from DK

Just in case you were wondering, I got together a few of our favorite projects’ brand identity designs for the year with some annotated notes.

I swiped the “Year in Pictures” idea from Sports Illustrated, which readers of DK may be surprised to know that I subscribed to from 1989-1991. Ask my brother, who patiently explained the rules of NFL football when I said, “Hey, switch it to Charles in Charge” during a Superbowl.

Architects hire DK

Four of our brand identity designs this year were for architects, a trend that started in 2006 when we made a new logo and web site for D+A Studio. This year, we did the brand identity designs for Seattle architecture firms Group3, and Case. Two others are in the works right now, including one pretty exciting design we’re just putting the final touches on for Joji Minatogawa Architects Inc. (Continued below)

The Year in New Brand Pictures by Design Kompany

Applying the concept

One of my favorites was the total redesign we got to do for the Northwest Asian Weekly, in honor of their 25th anniversary. What a fun project–we got to apply our brand identity design method to rethink not only the front page, but the whole inside template, too. Everything came from a core concept: “We are your window to the world.”

Getting to the heart of the brand message is what we’re best at here at DK. Once we’re all clear about what the new look and feel needs to say, how it’s shaped and colored gets pretty clear pretty fast. See more about where Design Kompany fits into your big picture of marketing and promoting your stuff.

Unplugging

It was also neat to lay off the computer for some of our brand identity designs this year. We like using handwriting to convey a personality. This worked really well for fitness and nutrition company Vibrance, the smoked salmon brand design and label we made for Spaccarotelli, and part of the font design we drew for Red Pill.

The Sketchbook

What I love about all of these is that we never have a clue where a design’s going when we start. Staying open to new ideas lets us gather up all kinds of thoughts. While all this creative exploration is going on, our process is built to extract and focus the main idea of a brand message.

All this is an adventure, like traveling about to see what you might uncover. I used to buy a new sketchbook every time I took a trip, and now we buy one for every new project. Some have gridded paper, others look like chem lab books, a few are those hardback bound journals that are pretty sturdy, and sometimes it works with just a bundled pile of looseleaf, lined college paper.

You have to start with a blank page, but what kind? Picking this after our first interview with you is the first step on our way to a new brand discovery.

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