Faultline is a small-scale design agency that specializes in video production. When I came to Faultline (named Faultline Studios, Inc. at the time), the team had just begun settling in after a large staffing change.

Challenges

To move beyond the large organizational shakeup, the team decided that a rebrand would be a great way to shift focus and improve morale at the company. They had three more specific goals.

• To create a brand that the team could identity with, instead of relying on what was inherited.
• Clarify to the community what services that Faultline could offer.
• Collaborate with all of the members of the team and improve morale.

Approach

Our aim was to distill everything that we liked about agencies like Faultline and create a new brand that truly reflected Faultline's potential.

We decided early that design decisions would be based on ideas that aligned with the company's goals and ideals. We focused on honesty and dependability as Faultline's core ideals and discovered ways to design with them in mind.

Solution

The development of the pieces took months, as the team was busy doing client work. The time for this effort was relegated to the hours between projects; the slow times of the year. In some ways, it was a vacation project.

Through meetings, we found that we favored minimal shapes over extraneous detail. This led to the simplified logo, removing the words and the lines of the old icon.

I opted to use different colors for the different pad sizes. None of us thought that the logo had to be the same color every time it was used. In one concept for the business cards, each card had a different color back (16 in all), but printing was cost-prohibitive.

What I Learned

• Good feeback is important.
  Getting several perspectives about your work from varying backgrounds will only make it better.
• The long game can be fun and useful.
  When projects evolve over several months, there is ample opportunity to broaden your pool of influences to make something better.
• Do more with less.
  You can't always get the top-of-the-line items with every bell and whistle, so you'll have to learn to make the basics impressive.