Monday April 9, 2007

Cultivating an Identity

by Jared Christensen in Design

2 comments

As I wrote previously, developing an identity system is one of the more challenging activities for a designer. It’s immensely fun and rewarding, of course, but the kind of fun that gives you headaches and makes your heart beat kinda funny at times.

You’ve heard the expression “the cobbler’s children have no shoes,” right? There always seems to be a struggle to find ample time to focus the talents of a company onto itself. So how does a company that is constantly designing for clients design itself?

Baby steps. Yes, it seems like an elementary answer, but the key word is “steps.” This suggests a process, not a willy-nilly “work on stuff as it comes along” situation. To develop independent of any process or plan is just chaos, but to build upon what has come before is something that we’ve found has worked quite well.

You’ve got to start somewhere, and once our logo was done we had a couple of very important pieces to knock out. For us, the first order of business was to create business cards — and fast. But all we had was a logo. What do you do with just a logo, and nothing else? You play. Experiment. Get used to the idea that you’re not going to nail it on the head the first time, and do quality work that explores possibilities. We figured no one was keeping score but us designers, and it was totally fine for us to not have all the answers. We worked hard, and took as much time as we could, and ended up with a nice card design that will undoubtedly evolve as our identity solidifies.

The second piece of our identity that we were under the gun to produce was a 14-foot sign to be mounted to the side of our new office building. The particulars of that task are best left described on another day, but suffice it to say it was a tough process. There were a lot of factors to consider, but — again — the freedom to explore was there all along. Not having carved our identity in stone in one fell swoop of the chisel had left us with room to wiggle and try more options.

Now we’ve got a blog. It really doesn’t look anything like the company website, but that doesn’t bother us. That website was redesigned long before the crux of Geniant’s new identity — the logo — had been designed. We know the time is coming when we’ll be able to invest the effort needed to redesign Geniant.com from head to toe. And when we do, we’ll have over a year’s worth of identity exploration in various mediums to influence it.

I used to be very concerned about the lack of consistency across Geniant’s branded materials. It’s important to me, and I’m still a man on a mission; a strong, consistent identity system is not off my checklist, but I’ve come to embrace the time and resource constraints as blessings in disguise. I have this horrible nightmare of what might have happened if we had just established our whole identity in one rushed block of time, unable to spend the resource of most value — time — to really let all of our ideas simmer. I’m certain that we would be feeling regretful and suffocated right about now if we had rushed that process.

As it stands, Geniant’s identity is evolving into something I’m quite proud of. Hopefully our iterative branding philosophy continues to help us discover what is best about ourselves far into the future.

Comments on “Cultivating an Identity”

1. Wade Winningham said:

   Excellent work Jared. That’s pretty much all there is to say.

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2. dagobert renouf said:

   great article, keep the good stuff ;-)

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