Green Ideas: A Brand New Journey
Green Ideas is a sustainable building consultancy firm, providing professional management services for LEED projects and education seminars/workshops to prepare individuals for LEED certification. In short, they’re experts in all things related to green building. In fact, the company’s principals were instrumental in launching the USGBC’s Arizona chapter and, as of this writing, all of Arizona’s LEED Platinum-certified projects have been constructed with Green Ideas at its clients’ side.
It was immediately apparent that Green Ideas, with offices in California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, is an indispensable pillar of the sustainable building community in the Southwest. Our charge was to develop a cohesive visual brand reflective of the firm’s leading stature in the industry.
Services provided: Brand development and education, strategic rebranding counsel, graphic design for print and web, copywriting.
Keane was contracted to champion a full overhaul of the company’s internal and operational materials, including:
- the establishment of an underlying visual theme for the brand;
- a mechanical improvement of the company’s identity standards;
- a modest update of the current logo, which involved adjusting the lockup, changing the face of the logotype and freshly redrawing the bulb mark;
- the application of the new visual theme to myriad materials, including ad layouts, proposals and presentations.
First Thing’s First
When we first dug into Green Ideas’ library of assets, things were in pretty rough shape. The existing identity guideline was a two-page document which specified two spot colors and one typeface – nothing more, nothing less – so we developed a fully functional and thorough manual; not an extraordinary task, of course, but an absolutely essential one to start with. Because Green Ideas was so closely tied to the USGBC and the LEED system, we developed a color palette emblematic of this framework while staying sufficiently unique to the brand.
When we asked Green Ideas what it was they felt they did, they told us they were in the consulting business – expertise, leadership, collaboration and the like. But as we started working on this project, we understood at a more fundamental level that the consulting activities Green Ideas offered was really something else – a journey.
We walked a few miles in the shoes of a Green Ideas client, not only to understand who they were and what motivated their actions, but to understand how they felt. Allegorically speaking, our approach is not unlike remote viewing – leaching insight and solving puzzles from afar; and so, when standing there in the shoes of Green Ideas’ clients, we stopped to examine our surroundings. It was a stressful environment, pocked with unseen traps and wild beasts. And there, just ahead of us, armed with a compass, a map and machete, was Green Ideas – confidently leading the way forward.
We latched onto this idea for one of our design concepts and devised a visual convention that was all at once distinct, intelligent, relevant and, perhaps most importantly, adequately flexible for a variety of applications.
Conceptualizing Applications
Rolling up our sleeves, we proceeded to apply the new visual kit to known deliverables: brochure covers, proposal interiors, photography, presentation layouts and more.
End result
An industry-leading firm with a more focused sense of self, a tightly disciplined graphics protocol and a compelling visual persona that is currently being brought to life internally by Green Ideas.
