having fun with the brand

Sometimes i need to step outside of the norm to design something for the sake of designing something. You know, "art for art's sake".

In this case, i wanted to be a little more playful with the Wold Creative Group logo concepts. With a logo, the brand recognition that encompasses the whole of a company within a symbol, one can hold onto the rigidity of the original design too much. I know that i have that tendency sometimes...and for good reason. With consistency, comes recognition. But, i do think that there is a time and place to let go of some of the standards and create something new with the framework of a logo in order to convey a different message. That is essentially what i did here.

enjoy.

welcome winter sports school in park city

Wold Creative would like to officially welcome the Winter Sports School in Park City! This unique school focuses on a quality private education for competitive high school winter sports athletes. With school alumni winning gold medals in the 2002 olympics as well as a high collegiate acceptance into competitive schools, they certainly know what they are doing.

Wold Creative Group will be working with the Winter Sports School in Park City on the their branding, brochures and with a complete overhaul to their website. We are excited to be working with the school to help them to grow within the education and winter sports training industries.

photography company branding

Michael Tallman, a professional photographer, recently moved from the east coast to Salt Lake City. While the wedding photography industry can be quite competitive, Michael Tallman stands apart with the artistic angle that encapsulates the emotion of the event. Wold Creative Group was brought in to help create the brand that incorporates the same artistic bent within the logo itself.

What we came up with is a modern logo that centers on clean lines and circles that incorporate the concept of a lens flare.

new life branding continued

The logo is just the beginning of the brand. The next step for New Life was to have business cards to that are consistent to their new brand. enjoy.

As a side note, the back side of the business card is real estate that everyone should be utilizing. Think of that area as a small little billboard.

amber technology logo

As a part of the branding package that we are doing for Amber Technology, we have come up with a new logo for their company. The focus of this company is to provide herbal supplements for animals. Thus, we have incorporated paw prints within the logo design while highlighting the fact that this is green technology.

Brach Design logo

Brach Design is a contemporary architecture firm based in Salt Lake City, UT. With the slogan "good design is always green", Brach Design has proved well that design can, in fact, be environmentally friendly while still being on the cutting edge of artistic expression and functionality.

Establishing this brand within a relatively new market for Brach Design was the challenge we have been presented with. Given that situation, we have come up with the following logo and brand for Brach Design. The logo itself is angular, clean and stands apart from the competition while being solid enough to stand on its own.

New Life logo

A church within the Bay Area in California has decided to go through a branding change when they moved to a new building. Thus, New Life Covenant Church was formed and we were hired to assist this process.

In order to encapsulate the idea of "growth" as well as Christianity, the following logo was designed for New Life. With a contemporary feel, this new brand of the church should help them to reach a greater audience as well as emphasize that growth potential that the church is experiencing.

RJ Connections logo

RJ Connections is an educational video company based in Central Valley, CA. While their website is still in the works, their logo is complete. The obvious market here is to educators, teachers and parents so that RJ Connection's educational videos can get to a greater audience of students. Since their videos are of the basic sciences, light blue and yellow were used to incorporate the natural elements of a sky while still being appropriate for both a young as well as adult-educator audience.

-jeremy

AD Campaign

Here is an example of consistency through an AD campaign. While keeping a similar style and messaging, this ad is mainly an "image AD" to introduce the audience to Fantis Group, a new Real Estate company. Even though this is a new brand, with the images and layout, this AD was made to create a sophisticated, established look for Fantis Group. Thus, we are implementing two key elements of a brand within these ADs, consistency and credibility.

consistency with the brand

There had been a few questions from clients about logos and how that logo can be used throughout various mediums. There are certainly no rules for this, just principles that should be followed in ensure the best possible brand recognition.

Principle one: give your brand some time. It is easy to want to swap out the brand periodically if you do not think that it is performing. This is fine to do every few years (5-10 years) to keep the logo fresh and current (look at how IBM, Pepsi,...etc. update their logo periodically while keeping the same structure to the logo), but let your logo fully saturate your market before changing your branding. If it doesn’t perform over the long-hull or you are updating the company itself, then it is time to update the logo and then push that logo on the market.

Principle two: let the ads tell the story of who your company is, do not switch up the look of your logo to attempt to tell your story. The logo (brand) needs to ground the various marketing/advertising that you are doing, it should not be used as the advertising (unless you do this intentionally to go against the norm, see sample below).

Principle three: the brand needs to have recognition. This means that it needs to be noticed but noticed for the right reasons. For instance, if you squint your eyes at a logo for a short distance, the text and/or graphic should still stand out and not blend together or disappear in the background. Thus, it will be easier to reach a larger audience simply because your brand is more recognizable.

Principle four: the brand is not the company. A common misconception is that the logo and other branding must convey all that there is about a company or organization. While this seems far-fetched, people actually want to try to do this. In reality, the branding is a small representation of the company that should have the goal of drawing potential clients/customers into your business.

I could go on, but this is already getting lengthy. Just remember that a brand is not a brand at all unless you get it in front of people. So market well.

-jeremy

7th Rig branding

7th Rig is a Hollywood-based production company. Currently producing a major motion picture, 7th Rig hired Wold Creative Group to help brand their company according to their direction and goals. With suspense and thriller movies as a backbone, 7th Rig needed a logo that was industrial, professional but also had an bit of mystery.

The final logo, pictured below, will be used for their corporate branding and image. We will be working with 7th Rig in order to create variations of this logo that will be used on the big screen.

-jeremy

Small business vs. large business

Whether you are a small business or a large business there are ways to approach marketing that should be standard. Here are a few of the basics.

1. Actually do marketing. A surprising amount of business folk out there still see marketing as a waste of money. These same doubters often rely on their own larger-than-life personality to sell and have not given marketing a chance to increase their business potential beyond what they can accomplish by themselves.

2. Look at the long-term (strategic approach). Marketing is not just about immediate sales but it can create the framework for a client/customer base for years to come.

3. Look at the short-term (immediate sales). Whether this is promoting a sale or it is the day-to-day sales, this cannot be overlooked so that both existing customers are not forgotten and potential customers can be added to the customer base.

4. The brand is sacred. Treat your brand with as much consistency and reverence as possible. It is not something to change on a whim or something that should be degraded visually or verbally for the sake of any immediate sales.

The ultimate goal of marketing should be growth for the business. No matter what size business you are, if you are not growing then one reason could be ineffectual marketing.

Market well,
-jeremy

simplicity is complex

As an undergrad art student, I remember being introduced to the minimalist art movement for the first time. These artists were made famous for such things as putting just a few squares on the canvas or leaving the canvas entirely blank. My first thought, like most artists who see them for the first time, was that I could have done that. Now, I’m not so sure.

For simplicity to work in art, there has to be a conscious decision to leave out elements. When faced with a blank canvas, it feels good to put all of your thoughts, energy and passion into making that canvas not blank anymore.

TIP: The goal of art is to express while the goal of marketing is to sell. Therefore, with marketing and design, simplicity is crucial for the viewer to focus on the message at hand. To do this, there needs to be a conscious decision to focus on a couple, or one, key element(s) and to leave out the extraneous information.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say you have a tee-shirt company in Oregon and you want to establish yourself in the market. You sell slim-fit shirts with age-old sayings on them. You only use organic cotton. You are a woman-owned business. You manufacture over 10,000 shirts a year. You sell to the western US. So, with that situation, what do you say in your marketing materials?

There are a few ways to slice this one, but you could say “Oregon Shirts, Organic Wisdom”. In other words, focus on one or a couple of items to put in the forefront of the marketing and put the other information as the secondary line of marketing (further within a brochure/website). The idea is to draw in the audience by the first marketing piece, thus, getting the audience onto further information to fully gain their trust in your product/company.

-jeremy

A big welcome to Powder Mountain!

As avid skiers (though there is a snowboarder among us), we are very proud to welcome Powder Mountain to the Wold Creative team. Working with some web development, branding and marketing strategies for Powder Mountain, Wold Creative Group is assisting with the guidance of growth of the ski resort so that it grows appropriately while still appealing its current customer-base.

We are very excited to be assisting Powder Mountain with its web development and marketing. If we must also have meetings on the slopes periodically this winter, then that is just a sacrifice that we are willing to make.

Here are a couple of Powder Mountain pics from this summer.

- jeremy

Target your audience

So you have a product or service that you are trying to sell. The avenues that you could take in order to market your product or service are innumerable. So what do you do? Do you use TV, radio, print, direct mail, interactive (online) marketing, telemarketing, yelling really loudly from your street corner?

First of all, as stated in previous posts, you need to take a step back from the medium (print, web, radio, etc.) and strategically look at your brand. What kind of company are you? Do you have any distinct features that stand out from competitors? Who is currently buying your product or service? What demographic do you think would resonate with your product or service?

TIP: This all comes down to targeting your audience. By answering some of the questions above (not a complete list there), you can start to figure out who your company should be marketing to. It is not a good idea to think that you should market to everybody because that is impossible and a waste of valuable resources. Instead, figuring out the audience that you should go after will create a situation where you are maximizing your marketing dollars and give you a greater return on your marketing investment.

-jeremy

marketing your brand

For most marketing initiatives there are a couple possible positive results. The most obvious positive result is that the marketing campaign directly translates to sales. The less obvious result is that the campaign establishes your brand within your market.

TIP: When going after sales with your marketing campaigns, do not lose sight of your brand. An AD might translate to some immediate sales, but a consistently established brand will translate to on-going sales and something that an AD alone cannot give…the public’s trust of your brand. If you look at the long-term reward for your marketing initiatives then your return on initiatives will grow exponentially with each campaign.

-jeremy