Branding
Brand Identity Design & Development
Emerald Seven Brand Identity
Hey, wait. Emerald Seven? That’s right: that’s us! Designing and developing our brand identity took years of iteration, on and off, both formally and informally, as part of our journey through the integrative design process. Finally, we’ve released it to the wild, and, well, here it is.
Emerald Seven Crest on Storefront Sign
Visualizing the identity of a company.
When it’s your own company you’re designing for, working out the details of your brand identity is a bit of a different process than stepping in to help a client. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it is the timeline of the process that is vastly different.
Before Emerald Seven emerged, our team formed a company called Simrell+Scott. We had projects popping up, and just flat out didn’t have the time or brainspace to dedicate to figuring out our brand identity. “We’ll come back to this,” we said. “We’ve got to get to work!”
Of course, years passed. At some point, we kicked the can down the road again and gave the Simrell+Scott logo a professional upgrade. It helped, but it still looked like we were some business-y partnership — certainly not a company full of creative types.
However, over these years, we always had it in the back of our minds. How could we bring our brand identity to life? As a two-person company, spending all our time together, we didn’t need to go on “ideation journeys” or interview any “stakeholders” about it. We knew what and who we were, we just needed to get it out of our minds and formalized into a real, public form.
Emerald Seven Crest with Emerald Inlay
Emerald Seven Color-Adaptive Logomark
Emerald Seven Brand Identity
Emerald Seven is born.
As it turned out, putting our finger on a name was the only thing holding us back. And, incredibly — likely since we’d had all this in the back of our minds kicking about for so long — we finally reached a tipping point, and in a frenzy of sketching and debating (literally from the office to a spot to have dinner), we landed on the name: Emerald Seven.
From there, we got down to the business of designing our new adaptive logo and logomark, coordinating our typefaces and color palette. Later on, we created the Emerald Seven crest, which is composed of unicorn knights, facing each other over the delta phi. (Maybe we will geek out about the embedded meaning of all this for you here, later.)
The Integrative Design Process
During this time, we were also kicking around an idea about visualizing our integrative design process — which is an interesting challenge, to say the least — and that exploration is integral to who we are as a company. The model of this diagram above is annotated to describe the integrative design process for a web project. But, the framework is applicable to everything we do.
For years, we circled around the Discovery phase for our brand identity. When we landed on our name, we began the dive into Conceptual Design. Throughout the process, we self-assess, we iterate, we evolve.
The diagram is self-similar across contexts: if you were to zoom in on the tiniest loop, it would match the first. There is no end. But, don’t worry, that doesn’t mean a project never ends — it means you finish a project, and you move on, but you understand that nothing is static. Down the line, our brand identity will evolve, as it should. The contexts around us are constantly changing. Being adaptable builds resilience and is what keeps you in the game.
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