Creating company branding is a gargantuan challenge for any company, even more-so for a company that specializes in design. As designers, our brand should reflect the very best of who we are and the work we aspire to create for our clients. When considering our rebrand, we first had to consider who we are as people, what we stand for, what our business stands for, and how our branding could be created in a nimble enough way to work for every possible need down the line. It’s not just a logo, it’s letterheads, invoices, quotes, white-papers, social posts, videos, even this website. It’s a lot to consider. Enough to make someone a bit bonkers. So when we started our rebrand we decided to begin with our story. From the beginning, Falkor Digital borrowed it’s name from the our favorite film character, the luck-dragon-dog from the movie The NeverEnding Story, by the name of Falkor. Not only do we love this movie, the character of Falkor stood for how we felt we wanted to be there for our clients. The character of Falkor is calm yet strong, powerful yet compassionate, even in the most stressful conditions. He swoops in to save the day, providing those around him with a sense of calm and confidence, just by being who he is. That’s what we want to be for our clients at Falkor Digital. A calming yet strong presence that swoops in to save the day for our clients in the one area we specialize in… pitch materials.
So the idea of the Falkor Digital brand was born.
Job #1 was to come up with a logo. Logos are important for many obvious reasons, but they also tend to be where you establish your brand colors along with your identity. We began with some basic premises.
Most of this was just personal preference, but the third point was non-negotiable. A great logo can be reconfigured for all sorts of different uses, while still very clearly being identifiable as “yours”. The next step was to defin a color palette, at least the core colors we wanted. To do this, we began scouring the web to look at different websites and color combinations we were drawn too. We also didn’t want our website to look like anyone else in our adjacent space. While there are VERY few pitch design companies out there (even fewer consultancies), there are MANY design options in the market. A few of our services, like long-term resource models, are offered by competitors. We didn’t want to look ANYTHING like them because what we do is unique. We provide more than a service, we provide pitch expertise and want enable our clients to do more on their own, without us. So our color palette was a combination of what we wanted and most importantly DIDN’T want it to be.
Having a great logo is a great place to start, but it certainly isn’t the finish line. We wanted to build a whole world of branding our clients (and future clients) could immerse themselves in. We were struck with the idea that, as pitch design and process consultants, we are sort of like our clients “little digital helpers”. Then it hit us, our virtual team should be illustrated! And because our team is constantly growing, with new faces and personalities, we thought it best for our characters to be non-specific. So our characters therefore have no faces, and no truly definable characteristics from one to the next. However, we also operate in the real world, so we thought our digital branded world should too. So we decided to have our characters interact with real-world objects wherever possible. The story then becomes that we are a team of highly creative individuals, fluid and modular, who work to solve our client’s real-world problems.
With the logo and world-building challenge solved, now came the fun part. Putting all of those pieces into action! Our team of Illustrators worked tirelessly for several months, building mockup web pages in Adobe Illustrator, populating our site with specific characters and elements that could compliment our story and our services. Along the way, you make new creative decisions, based on previously established ones. It’s sort of like The Simpsons. Once they had their characters designed, backstories defined, and established rules of engagement between characters, all you had to do was write up a situation for them to react to, and BOOM you have a Simpsons episode. Ok so our build wasn’t quite so complex, but still, having our colors established, our story, our style, and our world, made the step by step process of website design far less…complicated. With each new module, we could lean on all the base work we did early on in the branding process, to guide each new creative decision moving forward.
Is our re-brand future-proof? Of course not. Having the ability to course-correct when things are going as planned is vital to the success of any business. However, one thing is for sure. We have the right building blocks in place to make the necessary changes as needed. Currently, we’re testing out our branding across all kinds of marketing channels. From social posts, to white-papers, to even our contracts! Everything is getting the “branding makeover”, and believe us, it’s NOT easy or quick. We continue to find ways we can customize our branding for something we didn’t anticipate. However, having the core branding principals in place gives us the confidence to figure it out.
We hope you enjoy our new branding as much as we enjoyed making it. While branding isn’t specifically a service we provide (there are thousands of incredible design agencies who can provide that) we do pride ourselves on our ability to help our clients deepen the scope of their own branding, across their pitch materials. From time to time a new company or new pitch will come along that needs to start from scratch, and in those cases we can certainly help. Especially having gone through the process for our own company and sets of materials. Our team now has the confidence to take on bigger branding challenges, but for now, we’ll be sticking to what we do best…creating incredible pitches for our clients.
