This year, event branding and design was on my mind (because I was on the home stretch of designing the collateral for Phoenix Design Week 2016 collateral), and the ArtPrize 8 event branding was absolutely stunning. It was designed by Conduit, a design studio based in Grand Rapids, and featured a bold color palette paired with a library of art-inspired patterns and textures masked into an abstract 8-shape. Together the elements created a distinctly identifiable design language for the brand. Conduit used the colors, patterns, and 8-shape in a myriad of ways, which created a rich, complex, and exciting image for the event.

Being the design geek that I am, I dare say I paid more attention to the brand system than the artwork at the event. Take a peek at some images of the brand in action below!

The post 2016 ArtPrize design system appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

This year, several speakers dropped out at the last second and I was approached as a possible replacement. I was neck-deep in design for the Method + Madness Conference, so I must have had a moment of insanity when I agreed to do the talk. The theme revolved around the idea of process, and I thought it might be fun to share about my so-far-unsuccessful quest to find “my art.”

Its rare that I give a talk like this (heck, its rare that I give any kind of talk). The talk developed into more of a personal story, that ended up being really fun to share. In case you missed it, I did a little recording of the it, which you can watch below. Grab a comfy seat and get ready to watch me fail!

The post Telling stories of art and failure at PechaKucha appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

Robert kicked things off with the design of the PHXDW and M+M event logos, and set the overall design vision for the event. After a detailed discovery conversation with him, I was able to pick up where he left off and the fun began. I was lucky enough to get to design the program, signage, swag items and lots of social assets (just check the stats below!). The past few months have been a whirlwind, and I thought it would be fun to break the project down by the numbers! Plus, watch a cool animation of the PHXDW social graphics and check our portfolio soon for samples of the work.

The post 2015 PHXDW Design by the Numbers appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

Despite the fact that the word “brand” has become a near-meaningless buzzword, the concept is more important than ever in the crowded marketplace we all must do business in. So I wanted to try to tackle the question of “what is a brand?” once and for all, as well as related questions of what is brand-ing, how you go about building a brand, the benefits and challenges of branding and what kind of organization should invest in developing a meaningful brand.

What a brand isn’t

Before we get into what constitutes a brand, lets first talk a little about what it is not. You’ve probably heard this before, but I’m going to say it again: your logo is not your brand. A logo is simply one of your brand’s assets—a hallmark. Your corporate colors, mascot or product or company name are also not your brand. These items are all important identifiers of your brand, but they are not the brand itself. A brand is not actually a tangible thing—it is a concept.

So what is a brand?

If you’ve done any reading or research about the concept of branding, you know that there seem to be a lot of ways to define what is a brand. Here are a few of the clearest and most concise definitions of a brand that I have read:

• A brand is “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.” — Marty Neumeier
• A brand is “a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.” — Al Reis
• A brand is “a promise wrapped in an experience.” — Charlie Hughes and William Jeanes
• A brand is “the set of characteristics that arise in a customer’s mind when that person hears your name.” — Bill Chiaravalle
• A brand is “a container for a customer’s complete experience with the product or company.” — Sergio Zyman
• A brand is “a methodical influence on the creation of beliefs in the consumer’s mind.” — Dan Herman

Basically, a brand is your customer’s perception of you. It is an intangible concept—your audience’s emotions and feelings toward you. As Marty Neumeier has famously said: “a brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they (your customers) say it is.”

What is branding?

So if a brand is what your customer or audience thinks about you, branding is the process of shaping and influencing that perception. The fact is that your organization already is a brand—meaning, your customer already has an opinion of you—it is just up to you whether you choose to be involved in purposefully shaping those thoughts.

You shape your audience’s perception by designing the experience associated with your organization. Other synonyms for branding would be signaling, positioning or as defined by Debbie Millman, “deliberate differentiation.” As reflected in Millman’s statement, branding requires a great deal of intentionality.

How do I build a brand?

If branding is deliberate differentiation, then you must start your brand development by identifying how you intend to be different. Notice I said “how you intend to be different” not just “how you are different.” Differentiation is not a given, you must search it out.

The first step to discovering your difference is to identify your purpose for being in business. Once you know your purpose, you can identify your organizational beliefs and define the style by which you conduct business. These items—purpose, beliefs and style—make up the foundation of your brand. If the term foundation isn’t clear enough, you can also think of these qualities as the skeleton or DNA of your brand. Your brand foundation is the concept (you know, the intangible concept referenced earlier) that you want to reflect to the world.

Your brand foundation is only one half of the equation though. Once you understand your foundation, you must develop a plan for acting on that concept. It is this action, or experience, that brings the brand to life for your customer. Your brand experience is built from visuals, words and interactions that are designed to demonstrate your organization’s purpose, beliefs and style.

You must consistently reflect your foundational principles through each point of contact with your customers in order to influence their perception of your organization in their mind.

What are the challenges of branding?

The benefits of branding are many (we’ll get to that in a minute), but it is not for the lazy or short-sighted. Building a meaningful brand is hard (but potentially very rewarding) work. Here are a few challenges you’ll need to be prepared to face:

• Your brand vision has to come from the top. The leadership of your organization must be intimately involved with the development and execution of the brand (down to even the most seemingly-insignificant aspects of the business).
  You have to actually have beliefs to build on. Identification of your purpose and beliefs require a lot of soul-searching that not everyone is prepared to take on.
• You’ll be forced to find your uniqueness (or face your lack thereof). Branding is deliberate differentiation, so you’ll need to search out those differentiators, and if you can’t find them you may need to pivot onto a different path that is less traveled.
• It only works if it is authentic. Customers will see right through you if you’re not authentic. This means you might need to face the fact that what you actually are isn’t what you want to be, and from there you’ll need to decide whether to make change or find a unique angle on your current qualities.
• It is never done. Not only must you always be intentional in how you present the brand, but it is natural for your brand to evolve little-by-little over time and you must remain in-tune to those changes and realign continually.
• You will have to say no sometimes. Once you put a stake in the ground, you will realize that not all opportunities or decisions align with your beliefs. Things that may very well work for other organizations might not longer be a good fit for yours. You’ll need to make tough decisions in order to deliver on the promise you’ve made with your brand.
• Your customers will hold you to a higher standard. The stronger your brand, the greater your customers’ expectations will be. They’ll be rocked by any piece of your experience that is not on-brand, and they will let you know about it. Let this feedback challenge and fuel you to become an even better organization.
• It is an investment. One of the driving principles behind branding is building value for your customers, and developing value is rarely the cheapest way to go. Not only must you invest a great deal of your own time and energy into it, but you’ll need professional help with execution and gone are the days of simply picking the cheapest production option and running with it. All of these items require consideration now, but those considerations will pay off in the long run.
• It is a long game. It takes time and there isn’t always a metric to track it. But I challenge you to watch your numbers over time, and you should see long-term gains in customer loyalty, referrals and profit margins.

What are the benefits of branding?

Yes, that was a long list of potential hurdles, but the benefits of branding are powerful. Consider this: when you invest in building a brand, you create something your customers can believe in. They believe in you because they find a reflection of themselves or who they want to be in you. Finding a reflection of yourself in a product or service translates to fierce loyalty, and loyalty is pretty much the pièce de résistance of any sales strategy. But it gets even better than that: loyalty is an indicator of value, which typically produces a nice side effect in the ability to command a premium price because your customers place a higher value on your product or service than they do on your competitors’ products or services.

How do I know if I need to build a brand?

Lets call a spade a spade: not every organization needs to build a brand. If you sell a commodity product or service and have no desire to put in the work to innovate your way out of that position, then branding is not for you. When you sell a commodity, you are signing up for a race to the bottom on price, and branding has no horse in that race. However, industries that have long been labeled as commodities are rapidly spawning new upstarts that are finding ways to compete on true value, so you may not be stuck in the commodity game if you don’t want to be.

On the flip side, if you sell a product or service that is rooted in creating true value for your customer, then branding is for you. You’ll will want take a look at the foundations of your organization and make an honest judgement on whether you can identify a true area (or multiple areas) of differentiation. Once you’ve identified your differentiator(s), you need to question whether they are being reflected in your customer’s experience or if you need to put work into better defining the experience of the brand to be more memorable. If you’re wedged into a crowded market, you might look to brand development to differentiate you from the pack, or if you look around at your competitors and can’t see any evidence of a strong brand presence within their organizations, then you could be sitting on a prime opportunity to develop a meaningful brand own your market in the eyes of your customer.

Remember, your customers are developing their perception of your organization right at this moment. Now that you have a better understanding of branding—have you done anything lately to shape that perception, and ensure it is accurate and memorable?

The post What is a brand? appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

If you haven’t seen the movie, let me give you some background: A young woman named Holly is living it up in New York City when she encounters a new neighbor in her building. The neighbor’s name is Paul Varjak, but Holly insists on calling him ‘Fred’ because he bears a striking resemblance to her brother who is named Fred. Throughout the movie she continues to introduce him to all her friends and colleagues as ‘Fred.’

At one point, Paul makes a phone call to Holly’s former agent (to whom Holly had introduced him). The beginning of the call goes something like this:

PAUL: “Hello, this is Paul Varjak.”
AGENT: “Who?”
PAUL: “It’s Paul Varjak. V-A-R-J-A-K.”
AGENT: “Who?”
PAUL: “Paul Varjack. V-A-R…. it’s Fred!”
AGENT: “Oh hey there, Fred, how are you doing?”

Despite the fact that his name was Paul, Holly was so persistent in calling him Fred that eventually everyone thought his name was actually Fred. This example is a simple introduction to a conversation, but is a lesson in the power of branding. You see, if the definition of a brand is “what people think you are” then the “-ing” in branding is the process of influencing that impression. If you aren’t intentional in shaping your brand image you just might develop an identity or reputation you never meant to.

How have you purposefully shaped your brand today?

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To choose my album, I hauled out my (very dusty) CD binder and flipped through my collection of discs. Although it seemed important to select an album with an evocative title, I also felt like I needed to redesign an album that I had a personal connection with. I ended up selecting Fort Minor’s first—and only—album, The Rising Tied. The album was released in 2005, and was created by Linkin Park’s MC, Mike Shinoda, along with two other hip-hop artists. The album was a personal project for Shinoda. Nearly every track features a virtually unknown guest artist, and it seems he used the project as a way to experiment with mixing different hip hop styles.

The research

According to an interview with Fixins Music (courtesy of Wikipedia), Shinoda named the album The Rising Tied as “a play on words.” He explained that “this ‘tied’ group of people are coming up together” as they produced the album. I thought about the concept of collaboration—how on so many of the album’s tracks feature a complex web of sounds, and how the album itself features so many artists and their different styles.

In addition to Shinoda’s idea of the album title, I also thought about what it meant to me personally. When I listen to hip hop music, it makes me feel stronger and as if I can take on just about anything. The feeling of this album title has always produced those emotions in me, as do many of the tracks on the album. And the songs are rich with different textures like waves rolling over one-another.

Finally, with the word “tide” is intentionally swapped with the similar “tied,” it is easy for your mind’s eye to still envision the undulation of a mighty ocean. Although there is no evidence that literal tides were inspiration for the album name, I explored that inspiration point anyway because the mental picture associated so strongly with me. The powerful crashing of waves, and the ebb and flow of the tide just felt like a fit with the music and with the rhythm of collaboration to me. I researched tides and stumbled on an really great video illustrating how tides work, where I learned how the sun, moon and earth interact with one another to effect the tides.

The final concept

In developing this concept, I wanted to create a design that reflected both Shinoda’s original ideas of artists coming together and collaborating and my own feelings about the album. I liked the idea of creating some sort of mesh-like element to represent collaboration and realized that I could do that using long oval shapes that also represented the tide patterns shown in the video.

My original intent had been to layer the ovals in different colors so that the areas where they overlapped created additional colors, but this approach proved to be too chaotic and futuristic looking. The music on the album definitely pays homage to the history of hip hop and even some historical events, so the bright colors just didn’t fit. I also experimented with a purely black-and-white color scheme but it lacked the passion I felt from the album.

The final artwork features the mesh pattern reversed out of a deep red gradient that creates the feeling of a rally cry. Through these elements I’ve layered an etching from the Book Archive of a ship at sea, tossed between crashing waves, but still remaining upright. The movement of the waves and the texture created by layering in this image feels like the layers of sound on many of the album’s songs. Finally, the type is set (in Futura, of course) on a circular path that represents connection.

The post Futuralbum submission appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

2002

During my senior semester at Grand Valley State University, we were tasked as part of our Capstone course with developing a personal or studio brand for ourselves or our studio. I was obsessed with weightlifting at the time (an obsession that would stick around for a while) so I thought “Strong Design” sounded like a wonderful name and it stuck. In my defense, there was a concept behind the name at the time—my design reflected a strength of a weightlifter—but as you’ll see throughout the rest of this tale I’ve struggled from time to time with what the name means to me now, over a decade into this Strong Design’s existence.

The visuals that I developed to reflect this idea of strength were constructed with a lime green and black color palette—colors I’d thought were bold and strong. The logo was meant to be an abstraction of the end of a barbell or weight plate, and featured a bold, black circle with and “SD” reversed out of it. Even then, the Strong Design brand was founded on order and featured a minimal look. In our Capstone class we also had to develop a website for our theoretical studio. I wish I had a screenshot of the site I created. Even better, I wish I had a screencast of it. It was created in Flash, need I say more? It featured a spinning barbell that kind of zoomed in—while spinning—towards the viewer. This website was proof that every business will go through phases where they later wonder how they could have gotten something so incredibly wrong.

2003

Apparently I had the sense to know quite quickly that the Flash-spinning-barbell website was a bad idea. Thank goodness. Unfortunately I just moved on to Dreamweaver instead—WYSIWYG-style. My gosh that program wrote some buggy code. Since it was *so* insightful, I stuck with the weightlifting theme and featured weight room images (that I took myself, mind you) on the home page. In light of all the apparent randomness of this site design, the original color palette and minimal aesthetic still ran throughout the site and honestly, for my second website ever (in a time where there were few websites in general) I don’t think this was too bad! Strong Design moved from Michigan to Arizona in the following year, and if you can believe it, this site actually got us work.

2008

We finally realized that weightlifting metaphor was a bit tired and did a major overhaul of our brand image and website this year. This was the year of Strong Design red. We’d been using red as an accent for the past several years, and I must have finally realized that light lime green wasn’t as bold and strong as I thought it was. We would continue to use some form of red until this very day. It was during this year that we finally began thinking of Strong Design as a business with a message and a story to tell our clients. Not only did we do away with the tired metaphor, but we took the time to write pointed copy that expressed how we believed we were different and what kind of service we aim to deliver to our clients. We even determined a target market. Thus began the era of efficiency and affordability—the pillars of Strong Design in the mid-2000s. Although this is no longer in sync with what Strong Design has become, I’m a little amazed at how refined the brand and the website were at this time.

2009

How easy it is to lose that refinement. Apparently I felt the need for “more” at this time. This site featured more of everything: more copy, more pages, more cliches, more clutter. Plus, bubbly, beveled buttons. The only thing that there was less of was the logo—at this time we boiled the logo down to a purely typographic mark for reasons I really cannot recall (using Museo, of course—it was all the rage). Looking at this site from where I sit now, it seems we were in the midst of an identity crisis (I think the “more-ness” of this era was probably a mask for “We don’t know who we are”). Although, we did continue to beat that “efficiency and affordability” drum pretty hard.

2011

The identity crisis continues, along with “efficiency and affordability.” The one thing we seem to have figured out by this time was that all the “more” wasn’t working, so we boiled the site down to a single page site (which, again, was a cool new trend). At this point, our brand was so shallow, there isn’t really much left to say about it.

2012

By this time, I think we were beginning to understand that there was a depth—a “why”—that was missing from our message. I was working at Forty by day, and Strong Design by night and I was learning from my work at Forty how notable brands are built on the understanding of their cultural values and organizational style and guided by their purpose. A light went off in my mind. I needed to put these ideas to work on the Strong Design brand and uncover what we were really all about.

This year was a huge evolution for Strong Design. I worked one-on-one with my Forty colleague, Kim Higdon, who coached me through my thoughts until I could see clearly what Strong Design stood for. It was at this time were we began to develop what is now known as our brand design process (which was very much rooted in elements of Forty’s process at that time). We questioned the name, Strong Design, at many points during the process but in the end it just felt right to keep it. I developed a metaphor, values and keywords for the Strong Design brand as a way to create a mental picture of what the experience of interacting with us should feel like.

We determined that the brand should feel simple, accessible and timeless—much like a craftsman home. In fact, the craftsman home—designed to be both lovely and economical—became the metaphor for Strong Design and we used this idea to inspire the clean, but warm, experience of the brand. The color palette was selected for its warmth and how it seemed to have one foot stuck in the past, while the other foot was looking forward. The graphic treatments and textures were inspired by typography and signage from the era of craftsman homes. Our brand messaging reflected the ideas of efficiency and affordability (much like a craftsman home, yet also probably too much like our past 10 years of messaging). It was also designed to reflect the ideas of timelessness and simplicity, and we began to winnow our focus into the branding and web design arenas. The ideas of timelessness and simplicity were extremely well-received by our audience who, in the age of the all-marketing-all-the-time nature of the internet, were looking for help boiling their vision down for their brand or website.

As you’ve seen, we went through quite a few websites and quite a bit of evolution up until this point, so when we set out on this brand refinement, we were working toward longevity of the website and were early adopters of responsive design. We had a goal for the site to last two years (because honestly, brand evolution or no brand evolution, technology changes so fast that two years seems like an eternity in the world of the web). Well, we made it three years (kicking and dragging throughout that final year). We took Strong Design from part-time to full time in late 2012 and throughout 2013 it became evident that our brand was still evolving—quite dramatically in fact. By 2014 this image and website felt two sizes too small. It was time to evolve again.

2014

The Strong Design brand needed a realignment and we could feel it. Throughout our first year in business full-time, we evolved our processes to the point that they were no longer as efficient or affordable as they had once been. The “efficient and affordable” mantra had to go. Our focuses were changing. We still wanted to be a partner with smaller organizations, but with the quality of work we were looking to offer our clients, we realized we needed to stop rushing in the name of efficiency and to locate companies who, despite their small size, had the ability to allocate and invest appropriate time and budget into their brands and websites. In short, we wanted to stop flying through piddly projects and instead, focus becoming a strategic partner with our clients for the long-term in order to help them build meaningful brands and web presences. Nothing about our current messaging supported these ideas.

I’m not quite sure what we were thinking, but we thought a website redesign could solve all of these problems in one fell swoop. We were wrong. What happened was weeks of planning, writing, designing and even sending the files out for development. Thank goodness for a busy spell that kept our developer from starting on the site. By the time the wave of work smoothed out, we realized the site wasn’t an accurate evolution of our studio.

The problem was rooted in the logo. Over the last couple of years I’ve been falling out of love with our logo and I felt like it was an impediment to the redesign of our site. We were designing the entire site *around* this meaningless logo. You have no idea what a frustrating conclusion this was for me. Designers may thrive at helping their clients develop their logos, but are notoriously awful at designing their own (look up a few design agencies’ logos and you’ll see that most of them are barely memorable). I decided I was going to redesign the logo and treat myself like a client this time. The challenge would be to align what we now stood for with that decade-old concept of “strong” design—but how? Believe it or not, it came to me in church one day. The pastor was explaining how the original Olympic champions were awarded with a laurel wreath for their victor and everything just clicked for me. I’ve long-understood Strong Design’s purpose as a champion for our clients and their businesses—we want to see them win. A laurel wreath is the perfect symbol for that idea, and it fits perfectly with the name we’re questioned so many times along the way. We set about ideating this laurel wreath mark which was easier said than done. The traditional laurel wreath icon was overused, the mark couldn’t be too literal because that natural look and feel didn’t fit with the personality of our studio, and it needed to embody the feeling of victory and the boldness that it takes to get there. After dozens of hours we finally got there. The mark felt as if it had existed all along.

Once we had the logo, I started to redesign the website only to realize that I was trying to design without having taken the time to put together a strategy for the look of the evolved Strong Design brand. Shame on me for not following the tried-and-true process I wouldn’t dare stray from with a client. We put ourselves through the full brand design process—taking the time to think through and document our purpose, what we believe and our organizational style. We even designed the document just like we do for our clients.

Finally, with the strategy in place it was time to start crafting the website and other collateral using everything we’d learned about ourselves. The messaging we had previously developed was good (we’d put the kind of rigor into the content development that we should have invested into the design from the get-go—a classic case of the shoemaker’s kids, right?). The visuals were designed to strike the balance between expressing the distinct Strong Design personality, while providing a blank enough canvas to tell our clients’ stories in an immersive way.

Welcome to the new face of Strong Design. It is a balance of boldness and warmth, of technology and humanity—both distinct in personality and yet style-agnostic. We hope it will last for at least 2 years (where have we heard that before…).

The lesson

If you’ve gotten to this point in this article, you might be wondering why I’ve taken the time to compile all this information. There are several reasons:

The first is reason is a little selfish: we put a lot of work into this brand refresh and, like a proud parent, we wanted to show it off.

The second reason is hopefully a little more altruistic: we wanted to show that we’re just like every other business. If we’ve worked together before, we’ve probably talked about how there is no constant for a brand—it is always evolving. The best you can do is capture what you know now to the best of your availability, move forward, then repeat. You can’t let perfect paralyze you and become the enemy of something great. We wanted to lift the curtain and show that we have the same struggles. It can be frustrating that there is no “done” when it comes to development of your business, but the fight is worth it because the fight—and all the “incremental” progress—is what moves us forward. So tell us, what’s next for your brand?

Want to chat about this article? Tweet me directly @melissabalkon.

The post The story of Strong Design appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

Leap into the new year with a wallpaper version of the John Burroughs quote featured on our 2015 New Year notebooks. Available in desktop, iPad, iPhone 6 or iPhone 6+ sizes. Download the right size using the links below:

Download “Leap” desktop wallpaper
Download “Leap” iPad wallpaper
Download “Leap” iPhone 6 wallpaper
Download “Leap” iPhone 6+ wallpaper

The post “Leap and the net will appear” desktop wallpaper appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

Select the term you’re interested in learning more about from the list below:

White space
CMYK color
RGB color
Spot color (PMS color)
CMS
Hierarchy
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The post Design dictionary appeared first on Strong Design Studios.

Before going gung-ho with t-shirt printing, we used a stencil and Lumi light-sensitive dye to print a few prototypes (see this handy tutorial for how to create a stencil using freezer paper), and the process really couldn’t be easier. Once we knew we liked the results, we ordered negatives from Lumi using their mobile app in order to make printing the shirts a bit easier. We ended up dying close to 50 shirts to send to a few clients and colleagues as a new year’s gift, and although creating this many shirts using this process wasn’t quick, it sure was fun!

Our t-shirt prototyping process

The final product ready to send out

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