Faller Real Estate's identity process

Faller Real Estate needed a brand. As a new company, they needed everything from a logo to collateral and a website.

Preliminary sketches for Faller Real Estate’s logo

First round of comps for the logo with corresponding business card designs.

Round 2 with business card designs.

Chosen logo with color options and business card designs.

Chosen logo in chosen color with business card design options.

Brand collateral and website designs.

Process Case Study: Applied Biosystems – AMPSM branding

The first branding project that I worked on with the Applied Biosystems PSM team (consisting of James Stoecker, Design Director, Amy Vest, Designer and me) was called AMPSM (Applied Markets and Proteomics & Small Molecules). This workshop was led by Applied Biosystems' Global Marketing Creative Director Maryann Bell. James and Amy along with the marketing managers worked to set the tone of the brand.

I took the results of the workshop and began working on the AMPSM storybook, which was a visual story about the brand. I started by sketching out simplified ideas and graphics that came to mind from the results of the workshop.

After I finished sketching, I started searching for additional imagery that I could combine with the graphic elements that I sketched out. When I had many images that worked with the themes, I began designing the storybook. This went through a few internal versions before I handed it over to James.

From there James took the storybook and modified it before presenting it to the marketing managers. This became the roadmap for the AMPSM brand.

 The first project that I was to apply the details of the storybook to were ads for the launch. We worked with a copywriter to come up with some headlines that were in line with the story book. Below are my rough sketches.

For the ad presentation below I came up with visuals, some found, some created, based on the headlines from the copywriter. My designs were for the cake ad, the maze ads, the elevator and escalator to the summit, the jet pack, the runner and the package, while James designed the vending machine ads.

While the marketing managers were discussing the ad presentation, I started working on the look and feel for collateral pieces. We decided to keep it pretty close to the existing brand, but added details from the storybook.

The marketing managers sat on this for a month or so, before coming back wanting to see more of the storybook in the designs. So, still keeping relatively close to the existing brand, I refined the look and feel.

After seeing the second presentation they decided that they really wanted something really different, so it was back to the drawing board. They wanted even more of the storybook in this brochure, as well as the characteristics of the ads, so I revisited the sketchbook. The cake image from the ads reminded them of a wheel that one spins to win a prize, so I played with the idea of a wheel, representing choice. I kept the idea of the athletes and fast moving visuals, and also suggested a vending machine idea with various peek-a-boo options. I enjoyed trying out various form factors in my ideation process.

This presentation they sat on for a while. I thought they forgot about it by the time it came back to me. They loved the wheel, but wanted to show speed without a photograph. So I started creating images that were lines, similar to what you would see if you photograph a car driving by.

This is the final look of the brochure.

Though I thought it should look like this! :-)

After the brochure was finished, it was time to design all of the collateral that would go with it, as a media kit. Folder, flyers, and a binder with tabs. The last piece was the booth property for a tradeshow.

Folder with inserts

Folder with inserts

One of six tradeshow booth properties

Process Case Study: Applied Biosystems – "Caribou" brochure and brand

While I was at Applied Biosystems, my team was constantly working on pushing the brand. We did explorations and brand workshops. When a new product was being launched, we had to brand it. This included an overall look and feel for printed material. My team consisted of James Stoecker (Design Director), Amy Vest (Designer) and me. James started the project by asking me to create a mood board, based on the characteristics of the product. Because it was such a departure from the look of the previous systems, I thought it would be interesting to give small glimpses of what was in store for the consumer; playing off of the shapes.

After the initial moodboard review, we brainstormed ideas that could take the concepts in the moodboard and turn them into brochures. Amy and I split up and came up with some preliminary concepts for the brochure. Below are some of the concepts that I came up with.

Diecut brochure, playing off of the shape of the source.

Mini Brochure and case, playing off of the idea that it comes in a compact size, yet it's powerful.

When we presented out concepts, James decided to move forward with all three concepts; my two as well as Amy's. She took over my diecut version and changed it up a bit, and I focused on the mini brochure, but I didn't not move forward with the case. Instead I created a paper prototype to show how it would look with one for the QTRAP and one for the Triple Quad.

After I created my prototypes, and we were ready to create the presentation, I came up with some concepts for a folder.

And from there we created the final presentation: The first two (below) were Amy's designs. The first was a die-cut, gate-fold cover, horizontal design, the second had a peek-a-boo aspect where smaller pages that had big messages were between the letter-sized pages.

My design (below), based on the original mini brochure concept, had two versions of the same design. One for the QTRAP and one for the Triple Quad.

And an alternate brochure cover that was less of a departure from Applied Biosystems' look and feel, as well as the design for the folder.

The client ended up choosing Amy's design, so she went forward with the final layout of the brochure.