At the beginning of every year, Knoxville Graphic House has a meeting where we evaluate our company, ourselves and our goals for the upcoming year. In 2018, we evaluated what was working for us, and what was not in terms of our branding. Our brand didn't seem to fit the vision for company and the direction we were headed. We felt we had outgrown the style of our in-house collateral. Our goal for the next three months was to revamp and revitalize the KGH brand. In this blog, you’ll get to peek behind the scenes at the thinking and process behind our new brand.
Every designer knows this first step by heart. Mood-boarding. More specifically, we created two large mood-boards that sat in our design room. The first board was our current brand. We printed off screenshots of our website and social media, and collected our in-house collateral. The second board was a collection of design pieces that were inspired, intriguing and challenging. Our goal was to transform our brand board to look like our inspiration board. We resolved that if our new brand couldn’t fit on the inspiration board, we weren’t done yet.
The next step, was a new logo.The original idea for the logo was to take the letters “KGH” and make them into an symbol to represent the company. We loved the idea of having our logo be a symbol that could stand alone without “Knoxville Graphic House” next to it.
The finalized logo makes a KGH if turned counterclockwise 90 degrees. We chose to rotate the design so it made a triangle shape, which we enjoyed because of the allusion to our little black house. We felt that rotating the design also serviced a symmetrical aesthetic that our previous brand upheld and also that by rotating it, the logo more subtly incorporated the “KGH.”
After we nailed down the logo, we moved onto building the brand book. The crucial aspects that we covered in the process of completing our brand book were out voice, aesthetic, iconography, and obviously, how our brand would operate underneath our roof.
To look at our full brand book, click here.
Within the iconography of our brand book, one of the most important aspects were the icons that went with each of our services. These were important elements to define because these icons represent our talents and passions. We wanted to keep the icons abstract enough that at first glance, it seems as though they are abstract shapes that could match any of our services. But if you sit and look at each icon, there is a specific introspective idea behind the service provided that we designed for..
Social Media was the final frontier we had left to conquer...which oddly enough was one of the first things everyone that was following us was able to watch change about our brand. Over the past few months we have worked on revamping our social media accounts. We focused on better photography, better copywriting, a more clear voice, and a color story campaign to guide our social media feeds.
So, if you have been following us before our rebrand, we appreciate you. If you are new to the house, we also appreciate you. Follow along with our lives on our social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn). And sound off in the comments (or into our inbox if you're really serious) if you have a personal or business related rebrand that you want to accomplish this year! We'd love to work with you to make your brand come alive.