UPDATE: August 2010
On his blog, “Written in Hindsight,” our client Michael Salewski wrote an exceptionally thorough summary of his side of the branding process experience with Design Kompany. So awesome to read through what it’s like to be on the other side of the table.
Original post
You could tell veterinarian Michael Salewski would be interesting just by his first e-mail query: “Hell! I don’t even have a name yet!”
Design Kompany’s task was to find a name, design a logo, and build out the brand design into business cards, envelopes and letterhead. The stationery designs have just been sent to the printers. And the logomark we created is pictured above.
Who is Hindsight?
Michael is a veterinarian who specializes in not only Western-style medicine, but also acupuncture, chiropractic and herbal medicine. Most of the animals he sees are horses and dogs, and a lot of them are competitive athletes. He wanted to find a way to start his own clinic where more focus could be put on some of the “alternative” healing practices, but “alternative” is such a loaded word we knew we couldn’t use it anywhere on any kind of marketing anything. (Ironically, “branding” has the same problem as a word. Alas.)
Getting to start from scratch is our favorite thing, ever. This was exactly the kind of project we’re on for. Not to mention it’s what just about every graphic designer says they like doing, too. With branding you get to really make a difference. Your work matters, it influences how a business is perceived and possibly even if it’s successful. A bad logo mark can certainly hurt a business, people won’t take it seriously. Healthcare professionals and others whose new stream of clientele depends on perception of quality will attest to the importance of brand.
It’s been an A++ experience working with Michael Salewski, the same review you’ll hear from some of his many loyal clients. People will be traveling down to Oregon, where Michael is setting up, from the Seattle-area clinic where he has been practicing for the last two decades.
Taking the plunge to invest in branding
It’s scary to spend money when you’re starting a business and have a billion other up-front overhead costs, but Michael knew that going forward with a strong brand was really going to be important. It helped that he’d been through a branding process in the past with a company, so could see the value in thinking through what your business wants to communicate to the world through visual design.
He told us last week that he’d really miss working with us. Over the course of our weekly Skype meetings, plus Akira’s visit to Seattle where he got to just meet Michael in person and share a meal, really bonded all of us. We got to see how a veterinarian thinks about color, typeface, and calibration of light for his photography hobby. And he got to see how we go back and forth with ideas, things to think about, book excerpts, and those sketches that inevitably lead, over a series of iterations of course, to “it!”
Putting your faith in people across the country through the Internet
Not an easy thing to do to hire us.
For one, Michael didn’t know us. He didn’t have any referrals. He didn’t know anyone we knew in common. He couldn’t really do much investigating aside from checking out our website and having our interview meeting through Skype. But there was something there, right away, that he just got about Akira and me. “I kept going back to our meeting, and I really liked meeting you.”
When toddlers are involved
I was hugely embarassed that Kush woke up in the middle of our first meeting with Michael. Or maybe it was that he didn’t go to bed, yeah, that was it. That’s when we started making our meetings for times like 10:30pm EST. We wanted to be absolutely sure that our toddler wouldn’t intrude on our very important early conversations.
Kush hung out and colored his shirt with a pink highlighter while we all got to know one another a bit through Skype.
Asking the hard questions
But it was at our second meeting, well past the boss-man’s bedtime, that we really got into it. The who are you, why does it matter, and why do your customers care questions that jab at the heart of what it is that makes your brand singularly brilliant.
Yes, these are hard questions.
Yup, they’re difficult to attend to. Especially at a first (or yeah, second) meeting with virtual strangers. (Virtual, heh.)
If it weren’t for that incubation period for us to stew over what Michael’s like and what he wants to say to people, we would never have come up with the name “Hindsight.” It helped to stack competitors’ logos side by side and see just how same-y they all were. Veterinary Services and Chiropractic Healthcare and Herbal Medicine. It’s almost like naming a Chinese restaurant: Jade Palace Garden Temple Golden Dragon China.
The importance of getting it right
Getting your message clear is really important. If you’ve been in business for a little while, you know what I mean when I say you can’t be everything to everybody. Startups have a harder time with that. They want to keep Demographic A or Psychographic B. And sure, we know that brands build over time, it’s not just all about a fancy logo. But what going through a designer like us, a designer that thinks with you about your overall marketing strategy and then comes up with a design to fit, that’s more than just a logo design then. It’s about getting clarity on a vision. Even just talking through it a few weeks straight, thinking about it in the background of a day’s work, throwing ideas out to us over our Basecamp project locker—all of those things really do a lot to solidify meaning.
And the meaning is the important first step. You gotta define what it is you wanna say before anybody puts pencil to paper.
Finding the thread is what Akira and I are very good at, having done this a number of times now for some really smart people.
Sketches came. Drawings came. Typefaces then appeared. You should see our file section for this project, it’s awesome. There are notes from books, images from the web, photos Michael’s taken, photos Akira’s taken, drawings from our notebook, all of that is there.
As you might imagine, we’re very transparent about the design process, and especially for Michael. At our first meeting he said, “I’d like to know why you make the decisions you do, too. I’m really very interested in design.” It was great to have his input along the way to arrive at the final designs.
We’ll share the letterhead, business cards, and envelope designs when they’re back from the printers.
Cheers!
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