They needed a name. A name that inspired. Made you want to join a movement. A brand to go with it would be bonus. Through our conscientious dialogue of asking, listening, and asking some more, we found “it” for the Portland-based nonprofit’s founder Sean Patrick. Orangutan Swing works. Original post at Design Kompany, “How Million Monarchs got its name”
#Expat 2 will be @OldHavanaEats in #Durham, on 1/20/2012. A roundtable called Expat: doesn’t that just say it all? Last summer, 9 of us gathered for a conversation about inward and outward journeys. Ghana, Japan, train travel through Europe, and a lot more. Want to be informed about Expat2 and other events? Stay in touch with us on Facebook for 2012 “Orangutan Swing” events. Original post on DesignKompany.com/Expat.
We like to collaborate. A lot. In the top picture is illustrator Aaron Barker, with yours truly at left and our friend and musician Jace Krause on the right. We discovered Aaron’s light hand and gave him a commission: Miyabi. Jace did some copywriting for other DK gigs. At another Kitchen, we got to hear indie publisher Bruce Rutledge (middle left picture) share his ups and downs at Chin Music Press. See more pictures from Dream Kitchen, our lunch & learn series in Seattle.
You know what our favorite thing to do is? Make a collage. Using the right brain to express a “vibe” about something builds on written notes. Clients join, bringing pictures to the table. In fact, we bought the table pictured in this picture with me (bottom) exactly for the mood board session! Map images to 5-7 keywords, and voila, you have an underpainting for a logo design. The mood board is a major pivot session for our Orangutan Swing.
Nothing says, “Pick now,” than a stack of dollar bills. “Your task is to rank these,” we say to clients oscillating over 200 or so words. “Slash to 5.” In this picture, Dave Eva and DK spread tiny slips of paper with printed words on a table at Victrola’s coffee shop a few steps from our shared Seattle office building. It took less than 10 minutes for Dave to pin the core of A1A’s brand essence. Getting to the creative brief is the hard part, after that, the design makes itself. “I am really pleased with the work the three of us did,” Dave wrote us later. “The logo is a perfect fit for our company.” Original post at DesignKompany.com, “DK brands a Northwest orthopaedic sales company.”
Working with your spouse can get old, so we made Designer’s Korner. The Belgian bar Stumbling Monk just steps from our office quenched our thirst for a year. But we couldn’t bring minors. So we took the newborn boss-man, Kush, to Vermillion. Missed the La Chouffes, but welcomed port-filled warm chocolate. Doodling. Friends. New folks. When our interns Angela Tomson and Victor Ng joined us, we got to introduce them to a wider world of design pros. Kudos to both for working for a married couple. Original post at DesignKompany.com/Korner. Find out more about our upcoming events on our Facebook page for Orangutan Swing.
We are a two-person shop. We often think about what it would mean to scale. Would that involve hiring a lot of people, and becoming managers? Could we just work with talent that fit the project as we needed? A lot of questions come up when you grow a little bit in your brand. You realize you had this one idea of what running a business would be. And then you tried some things. What works, keep. What doesn’t, toss. It’s a good method. But we wanted to get perspective. A round perspective, you could say. Scale was our first roundtable in Durham on the topic of growth and business. Photos are all by Omni Studios. Originally posted at DesignKompany.com/Scale
Not everyone is ready to plonk a few thousand dollars on a rebrand. Fair enough. For them, we had coffee and bagels for Launch. At our house. In Seattle. “Launch” attracted startups and experienced solopreneurs. In a town as tech oriented as Seattle, people are ready to “Fire, Aim, Ready.” DK wanted to show people that nothing matters more than being up-front about your core essence. Exploring to find the heart of a personality is key to expressing it with authenticity. Real brands are created by people who care. Passion evokes emotion. Emotion builds truly great brands. Original post at DesignKompany.com/Launch
“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.
The rebrand for Matchbox Mobile was our hottest gig. We had to do a virtual version of our homemade Orangutan Swing method to dive into good conversation, because two thirds of the team was in Brighton, UK. It was fantastic to get to know them bit by bit. And hear them arrive at their own brand essence, and core identity. We found the name, and the rest was ablaze. “Setting your mobile vision alight” is Seattle and Brighton, UK-based Matchbox Mobile. Smart, wonderful people. We miss them :) Originally posted at <a ref=”http://www.design-kompany.com/work-done/1732/”>Design Kompany rebrands U.K./Seattle mobile software developers</a>
