WHO YOU ARE

In conversation, when you ask someone about their background they tell you their story—and then you start to relate more to the person. It’s the same with branding! The foundation of a brand starts with a story, so you’ve got to get your story straight! An inconsistent story creates confusion—but a concise, consistent, and well-told story puts your identity into words, building trust with the people reading and hearing it. We search out and create a new telling, build on your existing story, and leverage it to your consumers for maximizing relationships and emotional cohesion.

What’s your story?

VISUAL STORYTELLING

If you think about it in human terms, a person’s identity is more than just their face or fingerprint. In the same way, a brand’s identity is more than just a logo: it’s the visual containment of your entire corporate enterprise and expands into an ownable visual language of color palettes, patterning, symbols and iconography, customized typographic solutions, hierarchies of brand content and imagery… All of these things work together to express the positioning, promise, and personality of your brand, at a glance. Seems like a lot, right? We’ll even create a guide book to ensure consistent expression of your unique brand identity wherever you want to apply it.

A SENSORY EXPERIENCE

Sure, digital’s great but it can’t do everything—PRINT WILL NEVER DIE! There’s just something about it that seems—or feels—more real. For one thing, we’ve found that leaving behind a physical, printed representation of your brand can be seen as more intentional, more memorable. Maybe it’s a business card or annual report, a restaurant menu or a brochure, or little freebees like stickers and thoughtful note cards you ship along with your merchandise. We could even act as your own personal publishing house for an extensive collection of your poetry (lookin’ at you, Scott)!

Whatever you need, we have the capabilities and vendor coordination know-how to create elegant custom solutions that communicate your brand through any printed expression.

AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE

Environmental graphic design brings your brand into a physical space to intentionally and strategically engage with your audience. Consciously or not, people sense environments holistically—and designing within an environment elevates your brand storytelling into the realms of touch, sound, sight, smell, and even taste. We consider every attribute of emotional, sensory, and psychological touchpoint of your brand.

From simple shipper displays for in-store engagement and larger Expo exhibits, to holistic brand immersion in restaurants and luxury resort hotels—we create integrated expansions on identity expressions, strategy, story, and messaging for seamless and memorable brand engagement.

STREAMLINED AND SEAMLESS

The digital landscape—and our interaction with it—is constantly changing, evolving. We stay tuned in to market trends, best practices, and the latest technology to best assess how to meet your target audience—whether that’s from the comfort of their homes and smartphones, or on-site with point-of-purchase and interactive kiosks. The digital representation of your brand should be consistent across all media—so wherever you’re interacting with your people, we ensure seamless, intuitive engagement with your brand.

Whether it’s front end or back end, we’ve got you covered. Our team of experts in UI and UX design know how to integrate your unique visual system into a responsive and seamless brand experience for an improved digital presence.

BECOME A SOCIAL BUTTERFLY

If you don’t have a presence on social media, or are looking for ways to enhance your presence online, we’re here to help! Having a robust and thoughtful social media presence will strengthen your brand awareness, gain new audience demographics, and increase traffic and sales.

BE INTENTIONAL

How you represent your brand to potential clients or investors directly contributes to the success of your brand. Brochures, e-blasts, banner ads, paid social ads, business cards…From print to digital, GIRVIN will create elegant custom solutions that grab your audience’s attention and get you the results you’re looking for.

FROM A TO Z

Ever notice a brand that feels so put together even their fonts are so “them”? Chances are, they’ve had a custom typeface designed just for their brand—something unique that you can’t buy online. It’s the little details like that that truly speak toward a whole unique character. From quirky hand-drawn lettering to sleek sans serifs and everything in between, we’ve designed many custom alphabets for brands to really capture their unique personalities in everything they produce.

To start, we hold a meeting with top executives to explore the creative brief, and dive deep into the brand’s needs and goals. Next, we create hand-drawn sketches and digitize our concepts. Once a direction is selected, we refine the design and work with a type foundry to create all of the nuanced characters like ligatures and punctuation. And voila! You have a custom key-strokable font that is completely yours, and totally you.

BRANDING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

For us, sometimes packaging lands somewhere between Print and Environmental design—it’s a printed representation of your brand that contains your product, but it’s also got a physical, interactive presence that should also take its context into account. For packaging to be successful, we need to answer questions like “Where are you selling?” and “Who are your competitors?”—among others. Where and how your product is displayed and what other brands are surrounding it are important to note so we can make your product stand out with precisely and beautifully aligned visualizations—creating shelf equity and a brand presence that draws the eye of your intended audience.

We’ve created packaging for a wide array of clients—from snacks and beverages to luxury perfumes and cosmetics. Whatever your brand story, we’ll tell it through strategically aligned and elegantly customized packaging solutions.

WHAT’S IN A NAME, ANYWAY?

Names are inherently powerful—they can, in a word, tell it all. They breathe life into your concept and create a cerebral switch that triggers an association of brand image, promise, and offering. Our teams—a balanced complement of writers, designers, strategists, and multilinguists—have been developing names, globally, for decades using our proprietary and highly collaborative Ideator® naming sessions.

From strategically derived naming development, to nomenclature systems and architectures—with trademark screening, and linguistic and cultural assessment, of course—GIRVIN has long-running expertise in naming companies, product offerings, and services (and creating the messaging that lies therein).

SHOW AND TELL

Your brand has its own unique voice—it’s how you speak, write, and tell your story. It all starts with an internal self-assessment. Who are you? How do you talk about yourself to your team, employees, stakeholders…then, to your audience? How, then, do you talk outwardly to your audience and the people experiencing your brand?

Messaging isn’t just about writing, it can permeate everything that you do—how you approach your visuals, your digital offerings, your physical space, also sends a message. Whether it’s a positioning line, elevator pitch, or a digital user experience, we’ve got the teams and talent to not only precisely condition your content, but—through our proprietary Transparent Design® messaging process—to make it consistent throughout every touchpoint your brand has to offer.

THE ART OF INTENTION

There’s more to beautiful branding than capturing what’s trending on the surface. Trends fade, audiences change—we’re motivated by the long game. For us, it’s never just about a good-looking logo—we look at the soul of your brand, its past, present, and future.

That’s why we’ve developed proprietary tools to build brand business strategy—including collaborative development workshops like our BrandQuest® and Ideator® sessions that help facilitate intentional and unified visioning among executive members. Of course we look at what’s happening in the market around you—we devote attention to competitive analysis and researching what your contemporaries are offering—and our number one is discovering and amplifying what sets your brand apart, what makes you unique, and why that matters to your audience.

Starting with this deep dive to find—and define—the heart and soul of a brand creates a solid foundation upon which we can build an internal-facing mission, vision, and values, and then onto outward-facing messaging, voice, and visual storytelling of identity, packaging, social media, web, print, and more. It’s a transformation that happens inside-out, and it’s one that will stand the test of time.

THOUGHTFUL ART

An illustration isn’t just a pretty picture—it communicates an idea, serves a purpose, supports a brand’s story. Our team of uniquely skilled artists and designers provide illustrative content in line with your brand’s visioning, story, style, and needs, from infographics and icons to book illustrations and technical drawings.