Have you ever met someone who was absolutely EVERYTHING?? Everything good. Everything you wish the world could be. Everything you didn't even know you wanted to be in your own life? Well, for me that was Alex Carleton. Scary smart, incredibly kind, she had the absolute right perspective on life and still managed to be beautifully humble and easy to talk to.
When we first met, I was still a "graphic designer" and she was ready to put a new, more polished face to her executive coaching business. She had had another "graphic designer" take a stab at her previous logo, but she wanted to take it further. That was the moment I ceased to be a graphic designer and I became a brand builder. It would take me another 3 years to realize what had happened, but working with Alex set me on a path that I never wanted to step off. And without further ado, I give you our starting point. This is the logo that Alex had been using for about 2 years before she asked for my help:
It's ok! It's reasonable. Good colors, Alex picked them, and good lines. Slightly quirky. Sharp. But definitely not the whole story. Definitely missing something more. This was just a logo, what Alex was building deserved a brand.
So in we dove. Discovery lead to this mood board:
Alex loved it, and so did I. The little pops of red. The grayscale, without actually being grayscale. The humor. The subtlety. Like there's something happening here that you might not get, but you know it's fun and you know it's clever.
And with that, time for sketches:
Like the mood board, they're all clean, clear, intelligent, but with an element of fun. We stuck within the agreed upon color palette and I certainly took some liberties and pushed some boundaries to see what Alex would think. If you're curious about the origami duck, it was inspired by a metaphor Alex had used to describe herself. A duck sits calmly on the surface of the water, all the while it's feet are kicking at a mile a minute. How to make a duck fit for an executive coaching brand, THAT was a fun one!
Sketches and conversation complete, we moved forward with stylescapes. Taking Alex's 4 favorite concepts for the logo, and the realization that she really did feel connected to her "arrowheads" from the original logo, I created context. Context that made choosing something SO important... so, so much easier.
Take a look:
Now, it's important to note that Alex is an adventurer and an athlete. At the time, her hope was to build her coaching business into something that could help inspire executives in need of guidance to work through some of their emotional and intellectual struggle with action and activity. The stylescapes took that inspiration in ways that ranged from obvious and intentional, to something more subtle and understated.
And in the end, the call of adventure was too great. Alex took the leap into this BIG and BEAUTIFUL brand I had built for her:
