Breathing new life into an original brand
Our company was in need of a refresh. I realized that I needed to leverage our internal talents to form the direction of our brand. Using the same principles we deploy for our clients, I led our design team in defining the future of the brand of Sticksnleaves. By framing and executing design sprints centered around brand recognition, we created a brand that could scale, was clean, and captured the energy that Sticksnleaves was founded on.
By applying sprint methodologies, I led and conducted our internal design audit, launched internal and external interviews, rapidly iterated and crafted design assets, and worked with our marketing partners to identify our reintroduction into the Indianapolis market.
The design and business acumen that had been honed and cultivated within the rapid growth of the team called for a brand to match the new found maturity of the company. The representation of the brand, digital and otherwise, had captured a sense of optimistic levity in personality and tone.
In order to connect with mid-growth and enterprise-level clientele we needed to present a more refined sensibility without losing the original hallmarks of the company. In addition, developing a presence in a bootstrap landscape limited our ability to execute against scalable and ever-growing demands to be represented in all channels of the business.
Execute design sprints to rebrand over the course 6 months to maintain the original spirit of the company. Ultimately, the brand needed to be approachable, friendly, genuine, professional, and intelligent.
I quickly realized that this effort would extend several cycles given our resources. In order to deliver against client work and internal work, I managed deliverables from our newest designer while assessing our next need.
Over the course of a few weeks, I conducted stakeholder interviews, led an audit of our existing assets, ran and participated in design sprints, iterated and designed brand assets along with a new optimized web presence.
Each asset required either cycles of discovery, moodboarding or storyboarding, sketching or wireframing, low, mid, and hi-fidelity mockups and reviews. At each phase, I conducted check-ins with our designers to check against our original goal of connecting with our new audience in tone and execution.
After arriving at a mark that connected with the team, I refined and delivered a modern, clean and recognizable logo that held it’s weight against our competitors. We recognized that our mark seamlessly dovetailed with the idea of change and evolution much like the four seasons. By refreshing our visuals quarterly, we connected the metaphor of growth with the changing of the seasons. This dynamic changed was intentionally tied to improving our SEO.
We landed at a place that represented our original spirit while speaking to our new target audience. Our brand solved the issue of misalignment between a practice that had matured along with its clientele. Executing within the same principles of UX and design thinking allowed for us to contextualize engagement with us and refine each touchpoint.
