Billy's Branding Package

Billy had been diligently building his business for several years and was finally at the stage where he felt ready to explore a brand and logo. Kindly, he thought of me and my general predilection for design and sought my guidance. At first, I was inclined to politely decline since I wasn't as confident in my execution skills, despite being excited to start conceptualizing. Luckily for me, Billy was able to take what I could give him (lots of sketches and 1 polished concept built in PowerPoint) and get what he needed for his website.

The process:

Billy first sent over a wealth of information about his business, including descriptors like "quantitative investment research" and "comprehensive multi-asset coverage". The name, Hendeka Research, was selected based on its geometric reference to the 11 underlying components in his financial model. He wanted the brand to convey innovation, adaptability, basis-in-fact, and independence among other things.

After we had discussed his brand goals and background of the business name, I set out to start sketching as many rough icon ideas as I could. There were no bad ideas at this stage. I sent a round of sketches to him to parse through, he sent me back a few of his own, and finally an idea struck me that I needed to bring to life.

We had mostly been playing around with a hendecagon, the number 11, and the letter H, but we were struggling with scale. The nod to 11 was important, but the 11 sides of a hendecagon just weren't legible at the favicon level. It ended up being one of Billy's sketches that inspired me to inscribe a hexagon inside a pentagon for a total of 11 sides. I went with a knock-out style and left-alignment, so the resulting residual shapes felt far enough departed from the geometric inscription and could also provide fodder for other brand elements down the line.

When putting together the brand guidelines 1-pager PDF, I included a brief narrative depicting the inscription concept along with the final logomark on dark and light backgrounds. I had also been concurrently supporting Billy in decisions about brand colors and fonts, so I went ahead and mocked up several full text versions of the company name to see how the mark held up in-color. I even decided to try my hand at a brand pattern leveraging the residual shapes from the logomark.

Since I wasn't able to provide vector assets for the logo and supporting elements, Billy leveraged the concept I provided (which he and his wife loved, thankfully!) and built a more comprehensive creative brief for '99designs' designers to run with. Surprising even the '99designs' site moderators, his brief received nearly 1,000 entries, with the vast majority of them deviating only moderately from my original design. It was both a flattering and frustrating outcome - flattering in that it affirmed my skillset in brand design and creative direction; frustrating in that it exposed the vector-based gap in my toolkit. But next time, I won't let that stop me!

Thank you to Billy for trusting me with your business and I can't wait to watch it succeed out in the real world so I can tell everyone I basically designed the whole logo.