Blog Archives

Latest Posts

Monthly

Categories

All Posts in Branding

Featured Image

May 9, 2024 - Comments Off on The Little Engine That Did

The Little Engine That Did

How many hands does it take to start a 1915 International Harvester Mogul engine? 

Mogul engine installation

If we’re talking about the bright green machine that’s welcoming guests to the CoBank Center in Greenwood Village, Colorado, the answer is more than a dozen. And it all began with an EnZed client’s challenge. 

Helen Young has been creating unique marketing projects for CoBank for more than 15 years. So she wasn’t surprised when Arthur Hodges, chief of staff, asked what she knew about flywheel engines. She admitted she knew zip, being a Kiwi from New Zealand and not a kid from the Heartland. But when he explained how the organization wanted to acquire one of the historic farm implements for their office tower’s lobby, she was in. The right one, he explained, would do three things: pay tribute to CoBank’s agricultural cooperative clients, stand as a symbol of the momentum ag lending creates, and be the story-telling focal point of a built display in their art collection.

The wheels in her brain began spinning. 

Helen with Gene Rosenberg at his auction.

This cart-mounted Mogul flywheel engine weighs 2,526 pounds and is 8’6” in length with a detachable 4’6” front pull. Harnessing a horse to the front pull gave early 20th century farmers a portable power source to saw lumber, milk cows, run shellers and more.

Helen scouted vintage farm equipment online, made calls, and discovered a community of machine-loving history buffs stretching nationwide. A fine flywheel example was being auctioned by Gene and Renae Rosenberg of Spirit Lake, Iowa. She conferred with CoBank’s team who confirmed that the engine would, indeed, fit through the lobby’s glass gateway with all of two inches to spare. Installation? Check.

She then called Carla Carwile, EnZed’s writer for the past two decades and an Iowegian by birth, to start the project narrative. Whereupon Carla called her friend Brenda Davis DeVore, director of Prairie Trails Museum in Wayne County, Iowa, picked her brain and connected her with CoBank’s Hodges to get the grist of early 20th century farm implements. Storyline? Check.

Helen, meanwhile, watched the online bidding window draw to a close (whew!), flew to Iowa to finalize the deal, and found Brandon Slepicka, a collector of flywheel engines in Johnstown, Colorado, to operate the Mogul in its new Rocky Mountain home. Logistics?  Check.

You can see it running here. 

Make West engineered and crafted the installation.

Next, she met with Denver’s Make West team to collaborate on design and bring the display to life. In tandem with Leslie Wirtz, senior manager of CoBank’s creative services, Helen would direct the overall installation plan and design the text, colorways, surface patterns, and graphics explaining the Mogul’s role as both ag-changing machine and CoBank metaphor. MakeWest would engineer and craft the curved wall anchoring a walk-around pedestal base for the Mogul, integrating all with the center’s glass-and-stone interior. The finished work would display the green machine, original tools in the toolbox, and CoBank CEO Tom Halverson’s own vintage family photos of a flywheel assisting with Iowa farm operations in the 1930s. All involved shared the goal of a finished conversation-starting display worthy of a place in CoBank’s stellar art collection. Success? Check.

CoBank CEO Tom Halverson

The moral of this story? Maybe it’s that many hands do, indeed, make light work. Possibly it’s that the past still has a presence. Or perhaps it’s that momentum — like crops and companies and creativity — grows when the right energy is set in motion.

— Carla Carwile

Featured Image

March 3, 2023 - Comments Off on Salon Savvy

Salon Savvy

It’s a good hair day.

“A good hair day is the most amazing day ever!”, to quote the Urban Dictionary. Helping clients have more of them is the raison d’être for elle.b Salon’s Central location in West Denver. When the award-winning studio added skin, nail and brow services to complement their cut, color and extensions expertise, however, the word salon no longer seemed enough. EnZed Design was invited to collaborate on renaming the enterprise to communicate its expanded offerings and distinctive style. (A savvy decision, if we do say so.)

The new moniker, elle.b Savvy, was directly inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit and creative genius of the owners, founder and master stylist Lindsay Guzman and Dani Tavbin, COO. We collaborated with them on the renaming, then created custom patterns to brand their new space. Here are the highlights. 

The starting point was Lindsay’s vision for rehabbing a character-rich 1930s building. A true tastemaker and stylist beyond hair, she worked with local artist Birdseed Anthony* to craft the exterior look, landing on horizontal stripes in green hues. We worked with these repeating lines and art deco curves of the architecture to create a suite of patterns for the interior elements and signage. 

Branding with a bang. 

Hunter, Gold and Blush from the brand palette are evident in the exterior paint and lettering and the perforated steel dividers defining stylist stations. The panels feature a custom pattern that was routed into the steel with a CNC, then powder-coated in Blush for a sleek finish. The Pincurls pattern, inspired by the capsule-shaped windows and green stripes, graces the doors for branding, adds a degree of privacy, then climbs the interior walls to define each space.

While Lindsay’s interior design set the tone, the patterns and signage pulled elle.b Savvy branding through the entire building, helping to realize her big picture vision. We thoroughly enjoyed brainstorming together and springboarding off the ideas and talents of these creative clients. Hair extensions are one of their strong suits … becoming an extension of an internal team to bring a project over the top is one of ours. 

*Worth a deeper look: Civic-minded artist Anthony Garcia, Sr. and the nonprofit BirdSeed Collective he co-founded. 

Featured Image

February 10, 2023 - Comments Off on French Diamonds & French Toast

French Diamonds & French Toast

“I do,” was my reply when Denny’s creative services popped the question: Do you design wallpaper? 

I’d just completed a custom pattern and a dozen or so templates for the corporation’s to-go boxes, cups, bags, and seals. This new request was a special invitation — to design the wall covering for their Las Vegas Wedding Chapel* on the iconic strip. 

With unbridled enthusiasm, I reviewed the creative brief. My task was to marry icons from the bride and groom t-shirts with the iconic French diamond shape housing the restaurant’s logo. A childhood of road trips and a decade of designing wrapping papers groomed me for this very moment. 

Initially, I presented seven designs featuring a bow tie, diamond gem, and French diamond, adding some additional symbols of love and location. They selected two motifs to see in a variety of color ways that complemented the new restaurant interior materials, then settled on one design. We further looked at color and scale with mock ups of the wallpaper in the space. Denny’s creative team selected a tone-on-tone print on a pearlescent paper. 

The project was a grand slam. This background will be photographed behind many happy couples, cutting into their wedding pancake stack and linking arms to sip mimosas. 

Elvis may have left the building, but the wallpaper is here to stay.

Thank you, thank you very much.
— Helen

*Yes, chain restaurant weddings are a thing. Rate the best “cake” - post below!

P.S. Need a custom pattern for your project? Check out our Custom Collections offering.

Featured Image

January 27, 2023 - Comments Off on “I’ve got nothing to wear.” ~ Your Brand

“I’ve got nothing to wear.” ~ Your Brand

Custom patterns can bring your brand fashion forward.

Does your logo deserve a bigger, better sense of style? Whether making an online or in-person appearance, a brand requires a suite of assets — or wardrobe — to differentiate the organization it represents. Brand guidelines typically cover the basics, such as logo colors, fonts, maybe photo style and copy tone — the white t-shirt and jeans of marketing. But maintaining a powerful presence by ensuring visual continuity is far more complex – not unlike fashioning the signature look that makes a day-to-evening transition effortless. 

By providing my clients more options, customized options, they’re able to rapidly claim brand recognition beyond the obvious. Custom branding patterns, when designed as an integrated part of a client’s branding assets, add the flexibility to “mix and match” with ease. This creates brand recognition with variety — the difference between wearing a uniform, and choosing classics with the added flair of accessories. Plus quality branding begets quality products. A well-crafted brand communicates success subliminally, if not overtly. If great care has been put into presenting information, then it must be valuable. 

Case in point. When we revitalized the FCCS brand, part of the process was creating a suite of patterns that ranged from “boldly forward” to “background conversation.” The client knew a range of applications would be needed, even though specifics were still being determined. A child brand was born the same year, with the launch of their Accelerate Center. It, too, required patterns uniquely its own. Cross-over patterns worked to maximize flexibility, unify presentation and link the brands into a cohesive, powerful presence.

A suite of brand patterns and complementary assets can also work wonders to tie everything together. Patterns can grab attention and quietly accent. So if your logo is the cashmere of your brand, the pattern serves as the designer shoes. The gemstone ring, the platinum watch, and the diamond earrings appear via brand devices — bullet point, page divider, and quotation marks. 

The upshot? The ensemble is everything. Add a surface pattern collection to your brand wardrobe and brand recognition soars. And you’ve taught a master class in style.

***

What’s your go-to wardrobe piece? Comment below.

Join my mailing list to receive monthly reads about adventures, design, marketing, other creative musing, and how they all relate to and inform one another. — Helen

Featured Image

January 19, 2023 - Comments Off on Family Tree: Branching Out 

Family Tree: Branching Out 

Creating a surface pattern collection from one central design.

It began with a single leaf. My contribution to a calendar promoting Chicago’s Newberry Library debuted in the month of April, then went on to become much more. The initial task was to represent the library’s Genealogy Floor by creating an image encompassing multiple American heritages with their global origins. I chose to design a tribute leaf for each country or culture based on the motifs and colors I’d researched, then loosely assembled them to form our nation’s Family Tree.

Fast-forwarding to 2022: As the creative brief provided by the client had been limited to representing select continents, I expanded on the original tree by adding new leaf designs reflecting indigenous art from Latin America, Asian Pacific nations, and New Zealand, where I was born. The leaves were arranged into a repeat, while keeping the same loose placement on the bough. 

Can you match up the leaf to the motif? Comment below with the leaf letter and motif name.

A budding new collection. Next, I challenged myself to design to a full collection of surface patterns, iterating on the single-leaf motifs. I chose a shape or section in each motif to craft new, seamless repeats and simplified the initial color palettes. The new motifs turned out to be very different from one another, yet an umbrella aesthetic holds them together. 

Next, I toyed with the original motif as a repeating pattern in a new colorway — a soft palette for my bedroom, including a duvet and sheet set, plus an accent pillow. These designs came out of that motif and color palette.

A pattern collection is akin to a family, where the siblings are unique while the parents’ genes are expressed differently in each. I think of my brother at 6’4” with auburn hair, freckles and fair skin, and me standing a foot shorter with an olive complexion and dark curls. Eyes, toes, nose. Fun, puns, buns.

Seems evolution is its own artform.

***

Join my mailing list to receive monthly reads about adventures, design, marketing, other creative musing, and how they all relate to and inform one another. — Helen

Featured Image

June 10, 2022 - Comments Off on Is Your Website Rigged to Win?

Is Your Website Rigged to Win?

Welcome “your people” with an easier opt-in.

I’m a skipper now. I earned four American Sailing Association (ASA) certifications on my recent vacation floating on a 42-foot catamaran across  the Sea of Cortez, puffer fish hovering in the shallows below. I learned the ropes (aka sheets), how to anchor, and rescue a human overboard, which was actually a personal flotation device that got a little rowdy. 

I love learning new things. That’s why I signed up for B-School, a program by Marie Forleo, to help me focus on the next chapter of my business. I took the six-week online course to gain clarity, purpose, and a plan. I ended up also gathering some very simple, implementable action items for myself and my clients. As a graphic designer who supports marketing directors and small business owners looking for branding, marketing strategy and content development, I expected to sharpen some skills, but the higher-value takeaways truly surprised me. 

The first thing I will be doing— and recommending to all my clients — is to make a very small website change that will make a big difference. How big? 4400% big.

Make joining your mailing list easy and obvious 
Apart from “Save X%” pop-ups on retail sites, most “join” calls-to-action are relegated to the footer and Contact Us page on a website. We use SEO to pull people to our site and then get all shy once they arrive! If we’re intent on growing a mailing list of qualified prospective clients, aka “our  people,” ensuring visitors sign up is paramount. After all, they’ve navigated to your website because they want to hear what you have to say, right? (Call me Captain Obvious. I am ASA certified.)

Opt-in to owning it
When you think about opt-in or permission marketing, it’s like owning vs renting. Owning your house pays you back over time, and you can paint the wall purple if you want. The same is true with marketing — you want to own your media and control your message and branding within its walls. “Capture” people who value and want to pay for what you offer. How? Just ask. That’s it.

Well, sort of. Some may be thrilled to hear from you, but if your inbox is as full as mine, you need a really good reason to join another list. So, give it to them. Offer an exchange — something of value for their email — and be clear about how often they’ll hear from you. This gives them a nibble of what you offer to experience it directly. Your opt-in offer can be a download, percentage off, free trial, sample, etc. Keep it simple and — most importantly — thank them when they join. 

“We use SEO to pull people to our site and then get all shy once they arrive!”

On-the-fly fishing
SEO, press releases, advertising, affiliate links, and social media are the focus of many. But social media is passive marketing — people have to work to find you. Most small companies relying on social media for growth will be swimming with the puffer fish. Why? You don’t own the medium. Meta owns many platforms, so they make the rules and change their algorithms often. This, and the growth of ads, make connecting with your followers ever tougher.

Coming aboard
According to B-School research, email marketing is the most qualified medium with the highest control and return. Email boasts a 4400% return on investment.1 A reader is 6x more likely to click through from an email to your content than from a tweet 2 and 5x more likely to read your email message than your post on Facebook.3 If you're selling a product, email has the highest conversion rate (66%), and people will place an order that’s 3x larger in response to an offer on email vs social media.4 

The Why is simple: They signed up to hear from you and you deliver. Consistent communication builds trust, relationships, and community. They get to know you. People do business with people. Make it easy for your people to be part of your circle.

“Email boasts a 4400% return on investment.”

Taking the helm
During our Mexican sailing adventure, each student had their day as skipper. On Wednesday, I was in charge of plotting a course, choosing a heading, and instructing the crew on trimming the sails to capture the wind. The teaching captain was there to guide me. In that spirit, I’m captaining my own ship starting with these four action items I’ll share with you:

  1. Create an opt-in offer that rewards those who trust me with their email. 
  2. Add an obvious “join” call-to-action on my website.
  3. Set up a thank you message that delivers the offer.
  4. Craft a 6-month plan to send out interesting content once per month. 

Yes, part of Step 4 is writing a blog about my sailing adventure. Join my email list and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. (See what I did there?)  Jibe ho!

If you would like EnZed to craft a plan for optimizing your email list opt-in, contact Helen today.

References: 1. Data & Marketing Association  2. Campaign Monitor  3. Radicati  4. McKinsey