Has your organization evolved or grown through acquisition? Are you outgrowing the technical image that once set you apart? Maybe it’s just time to broaden the horizon and reach out to new markets and audiences. Or maybe, just maybe, the current keeps flowing stronger and stronger and it’s high time you made the move to a premium brand or service—and everything that goes with it. Whatever the situation, your brand image is vital to staying relevant in changing times.

Increasingly, companies, even nonprofit organizations, are faced with the daunting challenge of leveraging today’s technology, nevermind online or social channels, to provide a more honest and personal touch to their customer outreach. In short, many companies have lost the ability to speak plain English and their brands are missing a genuine human element. That’s where we come in.

Over the years we’ve had the pleasure (and challenge) of helping organizations around the world and around the corner, take their products and services into new brand territory. Whether you need a brand new identity or a just a refresh, we can help from concept to finish, including more specialized services like product naming.

Need some help righting the ship? We can workshop the big questions, onsite or off, with detailed brand audits and hands-on consulting. We can even run a day-long brand sprint to get your stakeholders synced up, motivated, and ready to evangelise your new strategic vision.

Screens are nice but paper still makes an impression. We can visualize your story on paper in any size, shape, and form. From elegantly crafted collateral and brochure systems to environmental graphics for tradeshows, our passion for branding and design detail gets the best of us. We’ve laid out just about anything and everything you can imagine on paper, including full-length books, magazines, journals—even tournament books and drawsheets for the USTA. Give us a call and we’ll tell you a few good stories.

Nowadays, alot of things can be considered “interactive” but we like to make a distinction between creating static content delivery and the act of eliciting a more active response from your customers.

Our experience here goes back, way back, to the days of architecting and executing “programs” for interactive DVD content and touch-screen kiosks for the likes of VH-1, Volkswagen, and Showtime Networks. While we apologize (kind of) for name dropping, this point is relevant: back then the technology was buggy, the hardware was quirky, and consumers weren’t instinctively trained, like today, on how to interact with a program. To put it simply, the average user would have benefited from a big green button that said, “Press this button, YES, this one, to get started.” Everything had to work, be intuitive, and engage consumers while driving them to a specific course of action.

Fast forward a couple of decades and our background in interactive design and UX still informs our work. In other words, everything still has to work, be intuitive, and have the ability to woo your customers into a state of action. Our work in online application interfaces and lead-gen focused interactive quizzes (made on marketing platforms like Snap App — not to be confused with Snap Chat) relies on the same principles. They have to provide a meaningful experience AND they have to deliver, while creating a connection to the larger brand. It’s as hard as it sounds but the impact is well worth the effort.

Marketing clichés aside, we believe that telling your story with powerful visuals and meaningful language, and sticking to it, EVERYWHERE, is key.

First stop? Your website. It’s the brand headquarters for your organization and should act as the cultural epicenter of your brand. On top of that, it should function as the knowledge base for your products and services, as well as the bridge to persuasive and relevant content.

If the last two paragraphs don’t put a tickle in your spine, they should. Every visit, every click, presents an opportunity. Whether you need a simple site or something more complex and dynamic, give us a call. And if you need to dial in a more aggressive content and marketing calendar, we can help there too. From driving traffic to online campaigns and blog posts, we can customize a solution around your organization’s specific needs.

Photography, like illustration, is close to our hearts. A well-taken, or “curated” (I know, overused word) photograph can set just the right tone for all of your customer touch points. From your next campaign to the pages of your all-important website, good imagery adds color, emotion, even humor to a well-crafted message. A well-chosen photograph has the power to comfort or alienate your audience, at a glance. In short, it can humanize your brand, enabling trust and loyalty.

That’s why we consider the creation of imagery such an important part of our craft. We sometimes spend hours searching for the right image, working with photographers to create just the right product shot, or even taking and editing the photograph ourselves.

Either way, the ability to create, pair, and style images to convey an emotion or brand value is critical in today’s, very visual, very fast-paced world. It’s one of our healthier creative obsessions…

While most designers shudder, and worse, at the thought of designing a powerpoint presentation, we consider it a staple of effective sales and marketing.

In fact, we’d loooove to tell you about the different kinds of engaging and high-level presentation systems we’ve created for our clients. Every presentation we create is completely custom. No boring cookie-cutter templates populated with pages of bullets and novel-length copy. We start by interviewing your sales and marketing leadership to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do to transform your product and sales presentations into elegant and persuasive brand stories.

If you need us to just make it pretty, we can, but in many cases, our clients rely on us to retell and revisualize their presentations. We start by streamlining storylines and supporting copy. Then we brainstorm and create “clean” diagrams and animated graphics that simplify complex or technical concepts. The result? We translate your big ideas and core competencies into something your audience can embrace.

We’ve even created looping animated “videos” to do just that for tradeshows, corporate lobbies, and on-location flatscreen playback inside libraries throughout the world.

If you’re still reading, we have to ask. How can we help transform your sales and marketing?

Nothing kills a sale, or your story, like a poorly conceived or executed user experience. We know that because we started “doing digital” before the web was a thing. Almost twenty years later, our experience in touch screen applications and kiosks continues to inform our work. We can help you build meaningful, storyful, and relevant user experiences for your online applications, dashboards, websites, and service platforms.

Before you move forward with your next UX project, ask us about the touchscreen kiosks we built for VH-1, Showtime Networks, Buell Motorcycles, The American Red Cross, and others, “back in the day…”

Not sure where to start? Wondering whether you’re asking the right brand or marketing questions? Maybe it’s time to start humanizing your brand language so you can make better connections, faster, with your customers…

If you need the kind of personalized attention that empowers going to the drawing board and asking the big questions or even challenging your internal status quo, we’re here to help. As much or as little as you need, we can walk you through the paces of rethinking then realizing your vision.

We can offer individual sessions or longer term engagements (with you or your team) to help create and implement “doable” strategies that position your brand to better identify, target, and engage your ideal customer(s).