“Money is a vector. It goes up and down.” The founder of OpenMoney.org is a Victoria, Canada-based thinker named Michael Linton, pictured above in red. He wanted DK’s help in articulating a brand message. Not drawing a logo. But getting a tight lens on what it is they were saying. Conference speaking was fine—that’s how we met Michael—but nailing it in a sentence! That swift nugget was what Open Money so painfully lacked. But there had to be a call to action: would people really trade in alternate currencies specific to a locale? Radical! Ernie Yacub (also pictured) joined our mood board collage session at Kornerhaus in Seattle. By the end, the pair could express Open Money as a human personality: warm, intelligent, ready to receive, and… pregnant. This was the back-end thinking to sculpt a message platform.