One link to rule them all.

So few digital products have actually changed the way we do business. But for me, Calendly is the exception. The day we signed up for it was the day we actively started getting more clients. Turns out being available to chat wins new clients, who would have thought?

There were so many times I’d be going back and forth with a founder about availability and timezones and thinking, there’s no way getting a meeting on the books should be this hard. This is ridiculous.

Calendly is one of those rare tools that actually does exactly what it promises. We’ve been using it at S&D for a few years, and it still feels magical when a meeting lands on my calendar — no back-and-forth, no crrrrraaap that spot got snagged right before you emailed me back, no oops I forgot to ask which timezone we’re talking about. Send one link and you’re done.

So when they asked us about working together, it kinda felt like karma.

More than a link

Calendly didn’t just want us to give them a light little refresh, they wanted to signal a big shift in what they do, not just how they look. Calendly goes to great lengths to make sure that their product simply works. No learning curve, just copy and paste. They’ve seen how much it’s helped people around the world for years. So they asked themselves:

“What if we brought that just works simplicity to more than just the calendar.”

What if we could help tennis coaches take payments for their classes without switching platforms? What if we could help that journalist take meeting notes so they could focus more on the conversation? What if we could change the way financial advisors track and manage their contacts and relationships?

These were massive questions. Maybe even existential ones for a company that’s 13 years old with a really solid product. But Calendly realized that scheduling was just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe they could actually make everything about meetings easier, not just the scheduling. We live in the era of making moves. They knew it was time to swing for the fences.

The Symbol—C is for confidence

Speaking of existential. When we start a new project we usually like to rally around the concept before diving into execution. It just helps us hone in on what kind of symbol to make before we pour our guts out into the Adobe Illustrator pathfinder tool and ten trillion pages of paper.

The concept we were feeling good about was this idea of making space.

Making space on your calendar for important conversations, but also letting Calendly do more of the back-and-forth busywork, so you can make more space in your day to do what really matters: whether that’s work, going for a walk, setting up AI agents to buy Pokémon cards, or actually eating lunch in a place that isn’t also your desk.

So we wanted the brand to feel like an absolute breath of fresh air. Calm and confident, nothing extra — just like Calendly’s original, simple blue link. From pretty early on, we kept describing the concept to the team as:

Calendly is the easiest way to make space in your day.

If you wanted to be annoying you could read this in a few different ways: making space for actual meetings on your calendar OR making space for all the things outside of your calendar, the things that actually fill you up and keep you going. The space that allows you to focus on building the company you want and the relationships that help you grow.

One tiny hangup — the Calendly name wasn’t going anywhere

So all this talk of making space is good and nice, but how does that turn into a symbol?

Gotta be honest, the hardest part of this whole project was the symbol. (Let’s be real, when is it not?) Unlike our project with Grammarly (now Superhuman) where they needed a new name for their next chapter, Calendly decided to double down on their existing name equity. Smart IMO. But this was really tricky for the logo because if you put anything figurative next to the word Calendly you’d be like…why isn’t it just a calendar? So after dozens and dozens (sorry, Tully) of explorations, we ended up right back where they started: “a cool C.”

The ripple effect

We presented this idea of a C with a ripple effect. To be over conceptually designer-y about it, this symbol represents the idea of how just sending one meeting link can change the trajectory of your business. Calendly is that first ripple.

Our first round actually had a few more ripple-y rings initially (fig 04 below). The Calendly team really dug the concept of the ripples, but they wanted to see what it looked like if we messed with the exterior shapes or changed the number of ripples. So after another dozen or so more explorations (sorry again, Tully) we landed on this single asymmetrical ripple version.

Perfectly wobbly.

The Wordmark—Invisible connections

The previous wordmark had a little bit too much of a cutesy vibe for this new era as a serious small business tool, so we knew we wanted to add some structure and sharpness to balance out the organic wobbliness of the symbol.

When Gavin Potenza showed us his first pass at this wordmark we noticed that when we tracked it in realllllllly tight, the letters looked like they were leading into each other with an invisible connection. And we were like hold on, what if we intentionally customized them to actually flow into each other?

Almost like how Calendly is the invisible connector for people, the wordmark can pay off that invisibility as well. (Like how I wove that right in like a sponsored podcast commercial?)

We edited the C to flow into the A and tilted the E so it would flow into the N. All with just the suggestion of connective tissue. It’s not something you’d notice at first glance, but it really helped sell it through haha. Everyone loves a story.

Product Icons—Call in the subs!

From the earliest stages of this project, we were asked to build not just a brand symbol, but a whole suite of subbrand logos to represent all the different things Calendly can now do. We had to somehow make a system while also making a series of marks that held their own and felt really powerfully recognizable when seen alone.

Notgonnalie, this part of the project was a beast. It felt like the two things the icons needed to do—be powerful alone and be part of a system—were diametrically opposed. So it was a fight. But we finally landed on this little set, and we couldn’t love them more.

These icons represent all the different Calendly products:

1. Scheduling — hourglass — the client didn’t want this to be a calendar because people would prob just end up thinking that was the primary logo, so they just wanted to get ahead of that nightmare. I thought the hourglass was a smart solve. Great job, Tully!
2. Notetaker — quill pen
3. Contacts — abstract human figure
4. Callie — an AI star for their AI assistant (can’t fight the stars these days)
5. Payments — credit cards

But we didn’t want the icons to be just standalone icons, we also wanted them to echo the idea of effortless connections—so we brought in a little something we like to call…gloop. Highly technical term. But the gloop softens the connections inside the icons, tying it all back to the way water ripples sort of emerge effortlessly from each other. It was a great visual primitive to lean on to unify the system aesthetically.

We housed the subbrand icons inside the same squircle as the primary logo for consistency across the product. Then we color-coded each one so you can quickly see which piece of the product you’re using. No extra thinking required.

Color—I’m blue if I was green I would die

Hyperlinks are blue, always have been. Probably won’t always be, but for now, most of the time, they are still blue. Maybe that’s why Calendly—which has its roots in hyperlink sending—has always been a blue-based brand. So we decided to keep them in the blue range, but we moved to a new blue. A different blue than all the other blues. A cooler blue. More chill.

The Calendly folks wanted this brand to feel almost as effortless and simple as the product does. So we tried not to use colors that were aggressive or neon. And eventually developed a palette with colors that can fade in and out of each other with elegance and ease.

We tried to capture those moments in time that you can’t quite touch: the warmth of morning sunlight pouring over your desk, the edges of clouds right at sunset, or the way light dances off of radiant turquoise waters.

You’re thinking—Mike, it’s really not that deep. And to that I say, yeah you’re right, but if you don’t get excited or fully enveloped in the things you do/create then what’s the point of this so-called life? I live for the details.

Imagery—It was all a dream

The Calendly folks very much wanted us to try to work some Midjourney images into the brand, which is still pretty uncharted territory for us in terms of consistency and scalability. But we put Gavin Potenza on the case, and he came back with some super interesting visuals.

Like the color palette, we aimed for a sort of dreamy untouchable territory with the generations. That let us make some things that focused on specific work spaces and others that feel a bit more abstract and vibey—sort of like if you tried to paint what a breeze might look like.

As we built the brand, we sort of moved away from using these in any large or wholesale way, and instead opted to use them as backgrounds and color references more than anything else. Having Midjourney generate unpredictable color interactions pulled our heads out of the typical run-of-the-mill color systems that are super prevalent in the SaaS world. So while they might not be used everywhere, it was interesting to discover new ways for this kind of stuff to show up in brand as more and more clients ask us to explore it.

:Aside:

We’re at a very interesting crossroads at the moment with genAI stuff. Clients want us to use it all the time. Most of our peers either fully hate it or fully embrace it. We still find ourselves smack dab in the middle as AI-curious. Can I use it to make backgrounds? Sure. Can I use it to make interiors of people’s home offices? Not without some weird shit showing up, no.

At this point, I don’t know what’s going to come of it all and I much prefer not using it. But at the same time, I love to use it for mockups and making realistic embroidered patches. I also love to build tools with it. Like really love doing that.

Overall, I like to know how I can use it if I want to, rather than it being some big scary monster that I don’t want to talk about. I want to know if it can be tamed. You might hate me for that, and I know some of you will.

:End aside:

Brand Elements—Time for patterns, patterns for time

Speaking of using AI to generate tools! Gavin Potenza worked so incredibly hard to build a pattern generator inside of Figma Make–aptly named Patternly. Gavin is straight up the closest thing to a design imagineer that I’ve ever seen. Truly a tinkerer through and through. So hyped he joined us for this one.

In the early concepting phase, Caleb had this incredible idea that we could use calendar blocks as a kind of repeating design element—just subtly referencing the way modern calendars look, with a little series of blocks all in a row. We liked that it kinda tied back to the product itself. But when the job became less about scheduling time and more about supporting an entire business, we knew we couldn’t overly rely on these calendar bubbles as a main brand element.

BUT…

We still loved the idea of representing time in your day, so we built a suite of patterns that could be generated to feel different kinds of ways. Because all time blocks aren’t the same. Every person you meet has a different personality or different vibe. We used these patterns in the brand to represent all those vibes.

We ended up using these patterns as a simple graphic element between the background and the subject, adding some dimension and recognizability to the brand. Some of the patterns kinda feel like an abstract version of meetings on a calendar, each event represented by a little vector. Others just create a sense of energy, motion, consistency, and repetition.

We also use them in abstracted product mockups on the site, where the pattern slowly moves behind the main action to make it feel a little bit more dynamic. The slight movement pulls the eye exactly to what matters most. Just a lil brand element to pepper into stuff to make it feel special.

Typography—No easier way to find type

The type combo in this brand might be one of my favorites of all time. TT Neoris and Wulkan were a match made in heaven. Neoris has a lowercase y that matches the wordmark. It’s got a great balance of sharp moments like in the uppercase K, paired with subtle rounded moments like in the lowercase a and t. Very approachable sans that still has enough personality to carry a brand (aka it’s not Inter). Wulkan has just the right amount of gloop to speak to the logo and icon system while also bringing an elevated feeling to the brand. Put ’em together and it’s like PB&J—a timeless combo.

Neoris does a lot of heavy lifting in product, where legibility is crucial. This is where the benefits of a somewhat quirky brand font come in. You can set the H1’s in Neoris, and it feels like a unique experience without doing anything extra or excessive. I know a lot of companies right now just want to set their brand font to be something as inoffensive as possible, but now we’re in the era where every single product looks identical. I believe you can be slightly offensive with your type. I promise not many people will really care, unless you’re Instagram, then everyone will care.

In the product we also introduced Geist as the body copy font, and see this is where I might lose you a little. Setting body copy in Neoris felt like a little too much. Too branded. Too extra. You still need a workhorse for those moments and lucky for us, Geist was the perfect fall back font for Neoris. It’s got a lot of the same qualities, just more legible in long form.

Brand Moves—Flexin on ‘em

Calendly is all about flexibility and connecting people. I set times that work for me, you pick a time that works for you. It’s the definition of flexible. So as we started to develop the core brand elements, we landed on what we called a flex bubble (just a more client-friendly way of saying bubbles that gloop together). But we loved the way these modular shapes could hold icons, event types, actions, statuses, times, whatever you need. It’s just another way to show that everything and everyone is connected.

This flexy gloop comes in handy in all sorts of ways. You can have it act as a connector on the web, it can show the start and end times of an event, it can connect partner logos to the Calendly logo, it can be breadcrumbs in product, it can be a holding shape for a series of photos or quotes, it can even act as a loading animation. Just a tiny way to build up some brand equity in a move that’s repeatable and interesting.

Productland—Just call Jud

Product design is always the hardest thing to show in case studies like this because realistically it’s a lot of back-and-forth collaboration with the client and tons of exploration that—most of the time—doesn’t actually become real. The work is necessary, but it’s just not as glamorous as some of the brand work. Especially because when you update a beloved product, the main goal is to make it seem like nothing has changed at all. Good design just makes it more invisible.

Since we don’t specialize in product design, we tapped design daddy Judson Collier to help us out and he honestly blew me away with his thoughtfulness and attention to detail. He’s also very fun to have on your morning Zooms. Highly recommend calling Jud for a good time.

We worked on giving the product a little facelift, injecting some of the new calmer colors and making some key interactions feel a bit more delightful. Our team also worked with Jud to refresh some modules for the website which you can see here.

After we handed off the project files, the Calendly team was like you know what? We love these patterns and textures so much we’d love it if you could make all of them move! So Caleb literally learned Rive from scratch to build out a whole suite of abstract product animations for them to use everywhere. They are just like tiny little explainer videos so people can see how simple it is to use. No one reads any more so we gotta show ‘em.

Anyway, shout out to all you readers out there reading this. Readers rule.

Per usual I just want to take this last paragraph to thank my team, Chara, Summer, Dayan, Tully, and Caleb, plus Gavin, Liz, Jud, and Justin for their work on this. Gotta give a particular shoutout to Summer, who did an unbelievable amount of work for this brand—creating countless concepts, logos, designs, and more. Lots of it was killed. All of it was beautiful.

Making work like this takes months and months of iteration and presentations. Aligning big companies on a rebrand is no small task. There are lots of stakeholders and even more opinions that you have to take into consideration. And it’s really really hard to do as a small studio with no account managers or extra layers protecting the design from the feedback.

The client is talking directly to the team that’s making the work from beginning to end. The team that built it also rolls it out. I’m not saying this to dunk on anyone or anything. I’m just saying that I couldn’t be more proud of my team for consistently delivering high-quality work, even when the way we do work has and is continuing to change so dramatically every day.

Special thanks to Chara, who does every single thing from project management, client management, strategy, copywriting, art direction, deck design, presentations—you name it, she does it. The studio would be nothing without her.

Did you like this project? Do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks, especially if you really love what you do.

Creative Direction + Strategy + Copywriting: Chara Smith
Art Direction: Mike Smith
Symbol + Wordmark: Tully Ryan, Dayan D’Aniello, Gavin Potenza
Brand & Web Design: Summer McClure, Dayan D’Aniello, Tully Ryan, Caleb Sun, Gavin Potenza, Judson Collier
Product Design: Judson Collier, Caleb Sun
Motion Design: Tully Ryan, Caleb Sun, James Dybvig, Justin Lawes
Project Management: Liz Meyer

Thanks to the wonderful team at Calendly who were an absolute joy to work with on this. Honestly, never met a client as on top of it as them. We’d ask for a file or feedback and it would show up within 24 hours. Amazing partners.

Tope Awotona: CEO & Founder
Shane Murphy-Reuter: President GTM
Jamal Miller: VP, Brand and Product Marketing
Katrika Morris: VP, Design
Amanda Norris: Lead Creative
Jen Johnson: Manager, Web Design

Wanna post about this? Here’s a link to all the sharable assets.

Branding Calendly was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Get in loser we’re going to low Earth orbit.

It’s not every day you get an email asking you to create a brand for a rocket that’s launching a satellite into the atmosphere. When I got the email my first thought was, “No wayyyyy. NO WAYYYYY. WE’RE GOING TO BRAND A ROCKET…IN SPACE?!” My second thought was much more composed, “Yes, we’d love to discuss the potential of working together.”

This project was a quick one. A really small scope just to get an identity together for a big announcement. Logo, type, colors. Bare bones. But because it’s a field we’re so deeply interested in, we wanted to go all out. And once we heard it was going to be called Cowboy Space Corp., we were like wow, that’s insane and awesome.

Yeehaw brother. Let’s get to it.

The Symbol

Just a little yee, not so much haw.

Cowboy, formerly known as Aetherflux, is the brainchild of Baiju Bhatt, (cofounder of Robinhood). And they are staffed with some incredible talent like: Joe Yaffe, Tyler Grinnell, Andrew Yarmola, Elliot Slade, and David Larson. They started Cowboy Space Corp. as an answer to the looming AI energy crisis.

Here’s the pitch in their words:

Access to energy is one of the primary bottlenecks for scaling artificial intelligence. This problem is driven by infrastructure timelines. Securing real estate, establishing utility connections, and constructing new data centers can take more than half a decade.

Cowboy Space Corp. is building an orbital data center satellite that leverages solar power in space to address the massive energy needs for artificial intelligence. A constellation of these satellites dubbed “Stampede” working together will scale the next generation of compute workloads in orbit.

In other (my) words, they’re building a network of solar panel satellites that will float in low Earth orbit, with direct access to the sun’s full power 24/7. Then they’ll transfer the collected energy down to Earth. Super easy stuff, can’t believe I never thought of it. JK the team over there literally have doctorate degrees in math and science. An absolute powerhouse, pun intended.

The wild west of outer space.

Now that you’ve got the context, hopefully the logo makes a bit more sense. With a name like Cowboy Space Corp., we had lots of visually-rich metaphors to lean on: horseshoes, sheriff badges, bandanas, cowboy hats, lassos, horses, spurs, saddles, bulls, revolvers, the list goes on and on. And pretty quickly, we started exploring the idea of a spur that’s also a sun.

But the challenge with these kinds of logos is that sometimes what you make has the potential to be iconic, smart, and clever. And sometimes it can just come across as cheap, obvious, or a joke. Delicate balance there. Def don’t want a space company’s logo to be too over the top yeehaw. Still has to feel responsible. Just a little bit of a hat tip, if you will.

Symbol breakdown: A little lean and a lot of love.

The final symbol can be seen as an upright spur, but when you look a little closer, there’s also a sun rising over Earth’s horizon, with energy flowing back and forth.

Simple, straightforward, yet strong with just a hint of concept that isn’t over the top. One of those if-you-see-it-you-get-it type of symbols. Tully Ryan probably made upwards of 20 different versions of this symbol. We tested all different kinds of spurs, different skews, grounding shadows. You name it, he tried it.

We landed on this one with a slight forward-leaning tilt to give it a bit of momentum and energy. I’ve been super attracted to non-symmetrical logos these days. Maybe I’m just swinging the pendulum away from the geometric butthole vibe that we got lumped into for some reason. Everything looks like a butthole if you want it to. Anyway…

Heard you liked type, so we put type on your type.

To balance the overt cowboy-ism of the symbol, we wanted the wordmark to lean more “Space Corp,” So we landed on the newly released Panell Expanded by Displaay. It has the perfect amount of strength, with a vintage aesthetic mixed with a few little moments of modern charm. The inktrapped lowercase A, for example, is on another level. Perfectly space-y.

I love the solid squareness of the typeface—and when you set it in italic, it just feels like it’s full of potential energy. Ready to zoom off the page. Which was perfect to pair with our forward tilted logo.

A fun Easter egg is that we used the exterior of the O as a bounding box for a lot of supporting elements, including some very fun patches that are def going on a trucker hat at some point.

Altogether, the logo holds up nicely in the visual language landscape of typical space companies, without sticking out like a sore thumb or blending in too much. Lotsaaaaa circular orbit shapes out there.

It also scales down nicely for favicons and social media. We even made a special little patch mockup for the social media avatars. Nothing says space mission quite like a patch with an orange border.

And because we’re insane, we didn’t stop there. We decided to pair Panell with FOUR other brand typefaces. Completely responsible and practical thing to do. But when you’re going to space you gotta look your best, you know?

We chose Similar for body copy and brand support, Autonomous for the “Corp.” in the lockup, Okima for bitsy detail info, and Talu to bring a little bit of western whiskey into the mix.

We really loved Similar as the main supporting brand font because it’s almost a classic no-nonsense grotesk like Helvetica, but they’ve incorporated just a few little kicks in the lowercase verticals that bring it into a somewhat technical feeling. Perfect for the space vernacular. Not distractingly technical, just a little bit of love.

(Disclaimer: Names below are fictitious for type testing only.)

Color: Rocket fire and dust

Defining a color palette for a space brand is always tricky. Your brain pulls you to black, white, and blue almost immediately. International orange/red if you’re a NASA fan.

But if you listen to your heart, you’ll find that there’s a lot of soul in space, despite there being no oxygen and immediate death in the darkness and confirmed aliens. It takes a hell of a lot of passion and dedication to strap yourself (or anything really) to a rocket and launch it into the abyss. We wanted to capture that passion with this palette.

We wanted the color palette to nod to the Cowboy name with a western, warm feel. But we also wanted it to have some pops of unexpected unnatural moments—colors that could bring the vibes back up into space, not just some old piece of equipment left to rust in the desert.

We always love to go hard with probably too many brand tones and combinations for the full brand palette. But the core colors are actually very restrained, relying on dusty blacks, burnt oranges, and warm creams. But how fun are some of these secondary combos?

Honestly, this palette is one of my favorite color combos I’ve ever stumbled upon. There’s so much nuance and fun to be had within these combos. We even mixed in some unexpected gradients that feel like something you’d see out in the alien-like vastness of Canyonlands or Joshua Tree—there’s such a magic and aura to the sunsets and sunrises in those places.

I did my best to capture some of the feelings I’ve felt when I was there. And the fun thing about this “plains gradient” is when you stick a bunch of them together they look like a unique take on rocket exhaust.

Charging the solar frontier.

Everything below this point was made specifically so you’d think this case study was cool. Not to say that all this won’t be real at some point, it’s just not real right now.

As I mentioned above, this was an extremely small scope just to get them an initial identity. But we couldn’t just hand over a nice logo and some wild colors. We needed to blow this thing out of the water. So here’s just a few glimpses into some of the brandwork pieces we made for this.

The Cowboy team had a moodboard of illustrations that they really liked, so we worked in Flora to develop an illustration style that they could apply to things like renderings of satellites, stock photos of planets, landscapes, etc. We found out Flora is also incredible at making pins and patches FYI.

Sidenote: I’m actively looking for an illustrator that can draw in this style so we can get some higher fidelity assets, but since this launch was a quick one, we just rolled with these as a solid placeholder for now. If you or anyone you know draws like this, please hit me up.

Maybe we’ve got more than one space-obsessed designer here at Smith & Diction, but this felt like an absolute dream project. One of those ones you keep not quite believing will actually work out—until it does. And then you get to put something super new and exciting out into the world.

This project came in as a cold email lead from Daniel Haire and I couldn’t be more grateful for his trust in us and guidance throughout this project. This project was a perfect example of when you put yourself out there, you never know who’s looking, and you never know what might just drop into your inbox. So keep making stuff you like, because some day you might get paid to make that stuff and it might just get launched into space at many thousands of miles per hour.

Thanks for looking, I hope you like this. We worked really hard on it.

Did you like this project? Are you also a space company? Even if you aren't, do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks, especially if you really love what you do.

Creative Direction: Mike Smith
Symbol: Tully Ryan
Typography: Mike Smith & Dayan D’Aniello
Brand Design: Mike Smith, Tully Ryan, Dayan D’Aniello
Web Design: Caleb Sun
Web Dev: Adriano Reis (Framer)
Asset Generation: Flora
Video: Ajax Creative

Client Team: Baiju Bhatt, Joe Yaffe, Tyler Grinnell, Elliot Slade, & Daniel Haire

Branding Cowboy Space Corp. was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s an unbelievably complex identity system.

Last year we were approached by Grammarly to brand their new AI agent. But things took a wild turn when they said, “Hold up, some stuff is happening behind the scenes…we might have to change the scope.”

Turns out that “stuff” was them acquiring Coda (an all-in-one collaborative workspace). Not only was the acquisition a big deal, but now the CEO from Coda was stepping into the role of CEO for Grammarly. NBD, just a massive org shift, totally normal. Then two-ish months later—another acquisition—this time it was Superhuman (an AI-native email app that a lot of CEOs/designers swear by). And guess what? Now Grammarly is changing its name to Superhuman.

Hold up. What is going on??????

Our little AI agent branding gig just turned into a giant merger of three beloved companies that are building the future of AI-native workspaces, taking the challenge head on.

This post is a little (extensive) behind the scenes look at how we developed an interactive identity with motion design at it’s core while the brand architecture was constantly evolving every day.

Then a Hero comes along…

We started this project like we start every project, with mild panic. Just kidddddding, 99% of the time we start on paper, just doodling stuff. My sketches don’t look anything like the designer-y Instagram sketches with fancy pencils, splayed Pantone books, rulers, and whatnot. It’s literally just doodles of random shapes. Some of which include teleportation?

I was working on logo concepts and I was just drawing the basic shapes, you know the ones: triangles, circles, squares, octagons, etc., to see if I could get a story to fall out of any of them. Then I drew this arrow and was like hmm, that kinda looks like a cursor, oh wow it also kinda looks like a cape. I wonder if I put a dot on top of tha…OH MY GOD IT’S A SUPERHERO.

Just putting the dot on top of the cursor shape made my mind take off like a rocket. We could do so so so much with just these two shapes. And my first thought was: there’s no way they are going to let us get away with this. There’s just no way.

I knew we had something special, so I called in the big guns Justin Lawes to animate this bud for our first round presentation, even before the client had seen anything. I just felt that this logo needed to be in motion in order for it to be a contender. I worked up a super rough outline of all the things that this logo/character could potentially do—not knowing if this was even part of the product at all—just overdelivering to try to sell a direction we believed in.

We presented this, and a few other logos, and — I’m not kidding — the second the presentation was over, Collin from Grammarly took it straight to the legal department to check if we could use it. He got the vision. He was sold on the spot. Now we just needed to get buy-in from 16 different CEOs. Really just two CEOs but also the cofounder and the CPO of Grammarly, a lot of pressure to put on one symbol (and also my nervous system).

When we were presenting the logo to the execs, one of their only comments was, “What should we call it?” and without missing a beat, Rahul from Superhuman just said, “Hero.” And it was like the clouds parted to a beautiful blue sky full of potential.

So now, I’d love to introduce you to Hero. The new logo and mascot for Superhuman.

The one thing they don’t tell you about unintentionally designing a mascot/character as a logo is that it opens up one of the largest cans of worms that could possibly exist.

Here are some actual things we talked about over the course of many meetings:

Does it have a personality? Is it cute? How much is too cute? How do we NOT make it feel like Clippy? Should it feel like Clippy? Does the head have magical powers? Should it wave? Should it spin? What’s the weighted relationship between the head and the cape? Can the cape morph into things? Should it be a color? Should it be 3D? What material can it be made out of? How dense is it? How heavy should it feel? Can it fly around your screen? Can the cursor be seen without the head? Is it called a cursor or a pointer? Should it have a stroke around it like a real cursor? Does it have human qualities? Can it dance? It shouldn’t dance…right?

UI Icons

We loved the simplicity and malleability of Hero so much that we tried to work it into the UI icon system. It was a fun little challenge to try and build a whole library that included some part of Hero in one way or another. The moments where it felt really successful were when the cape shape fit into the arrow on version history, the little tie on account symbol, and the tip of the pencil on the writing icon, just some fun little nods towards the logo.

Turns out trying to include a little weird triangle in a system of over 500 icons is not ideal. So Helena Zhang, icon extraordinaire, lent a helping hand to build out the full system.

Instead of leaning into the shape of Hero as a whole, she took a more deconstructed approach for added flexibility. She referenced all the details of the full logo—not only Hero’s cursor, but also the dot, the outside squircle, the angles, the corners, and the roundness-meets-chunkiness of the Superhuman wordmark. Then she turned it into a complete system that balances soft and sharp elements to create a precise, yet human feeling that can extend across the entire icon library.

A wordmark that speaks a thousand words—actually, just one word.

We made a lot of wordmarks, like a lot a lot. You name it, we tried it. But when push came to shove, we realized that Superhuman already had a widely recognized brand, one that felt luxurious and sleek with its thin, tracked-out wordmark. So we focused on creating something that felt like a thoughtful evolution. Not a lot of wordmarks in the tech space are feeling elegant these days so we were like, let’s just keep the ethos and vibe of the original but add some more momentum and concept to it.

We started with the base of Toroka specifically because of its rounded A and how it nodded to the cape shape from the symbol. It had a feeling of approachability without going overly cute. Compared to the original wordmark, we brought in the tracking a bit and went with a bolder weight to give it more of a presence in smaller spaces.

The bolder weight also allows us to pair sub-brands with it, set in lighter weights, down the road. Think like SUPERHUMAN Mail, SUPERHUMAN Documents, etc. We also customized the P & R to give it some upward momentum.

One of the main pieces of direction from the Grammarly team was that they wanted it to feel like the word that was written, almost onomatopoetic. It needed to feel super, but also a little bit human.

For a product that’s entirely about words, we had to get the type right.

When you acquire a bunch of different companies, that means you acquire their products…and all of their illustration styles and type families as well. So suddenly they were using about seven or eight different type families across all of their platforms which, if you know anything about type licenses, gets really really expensive. (Not to mention really inconsistent.) So how do we solve this?

We suggested, hey, what if we use a super family? Something with a sans, a serif, and a mono all built around the same baseline principles. (It’s not lost on me that we proposed using a super family for Superhuman.) The goal was to let the type seamlessly switch from sans to serif both throughout the brand and within the product canvas itself.

Fun side note: I put out a tweet asking about super families and Matthew Smith ended up putting together an entire directory of them for everyone to enjoy. The internet is great sometimes. Awful most times tho.

We ended up choosing Messina from Luzi Type as our foundation, because its sans could rival Inter (anyone who thinks Inter is the best font is more than welcome to fight me, you just have no imagination) for its extremely functional qualities in product, while the serif adds some elegant writerly qualities to the brand.

Using them interchangeably in paragraphs just felt so special, like it doesn’t need to be that pretty. In an era where every product looks almost identical, maybe a beautiful swashy italic would be the thing to make users feel like this was something different, something more thoughtful and not just another soulless clone.

Not to mention Messina also came with a mono, so we could use it for code snippets and still feel consistent. Shout out to Luzi for making this beast. You’re a legend dude.

Supersizing Messina.

Since Superhuman needed such a comprehensive license, we were like welllll, why don’t we take the opportunity to make it exacttttttly how we want? A semi-custom brand typeface?? AND we get to name it?? What a DREAM!!

Introducing Super Sans & Super Serif

Our most noticeable customization was rounding all the punctuation and tittles to match the rounded qualities of Hero. Simply rounding the squares of the typeface made if feel so much more approachable and ownable.

We also added in some secret custom glyphs and arrows built to mirror Hero. Because when a cursor is built into your logo, why wouldn’t you make some alternate arrows that reflect your primitive geometry?

A color palette full of heart and mystery.

We approached color by breaking up the name Superhuman. What can we make that feels super? What can we make that feels human?

Mysteria

For the super side of things we wanted to lean a bit into magic and mystery of superheroes and their powers, so our primary color is a purple we named Mysteria. It’s a color that elegantly straddles the line between blue and purple. We were aiming to make a color that felt like it was floating or hovering. A floating color? Lofty concept, I know. But this Mysteria color felt like a twilight sky being lit up by some sort of magical aura.

Heart

For the human side of things, we decided to get a bit more warm and moody to bring things back down to Earth. Our second brand color is something we named Heart. A deep maroon that has a sense of seriousness and professionalism to it. It’s the perfect balance to Mysteria’s lightness. When these two colors get together, it creates a wonderfully unique combo that doesn’t feel like I’ve seen it 10 trillion times.

The art of the process.

The new Superhuman works with you and helps you write every step of the way, from ideation through to final product. Whether that’s a term paper, a novel, an email to your boss to tell them that you’re quitting, a cover letter (for your new job), or even just a kind letter to a friend. The whole point is that Superhuman is almost like this invisible superpower you can tap into at any time.

For the marketing materials, we wanted to make something that felt different. Not just another faked UI screen with text that says “Emails, Faster!” We wanted to show the beauty of the writing process. And we knew we wanted it to start with the idea that no matter what you want to say, it always starts with you, a human. Human thoughts and ideas are the beginning of every written thing, so we wanted to showcase people, not products.

This is a bit of a heady concept, but before you read all of the stuff I’m about to write below, our goal was to just make something that felt pretty. I don’t know why we always need to add 15 layers (or in this case 5) of concept to everything that we do, but it’s just the Smith & Diction way at this point.

01. Human Layer — Every idea starts with a human.

At the center of everything is humans. People. Users. You. And ideas are what make us human. It’s why we named the brain, brain. Ideas are why humans built the whole world. Shamrock Shake? That was someone’s idea! Churros were also just an idea at one point believe it or not!

02. Idea Layer — This represents a kind of flow state, just expressing thoughts.

Ideas are messy and fleeting, they come and they go. So few of our ideas make it out of our mouths or our minds. Even fewer make it onto paper or get typed into the keyboard. So this layer is meant to showcase that moment when an idea falls out of your mind and tumbles down your arm into your hand and is scratched out of a pen onto paper, or scrawled on the back of a napkin. It’s meant to show that we’re not letting the computer take our ideas away.

03. Technical Layer—Then the digital tools add clarity and precision.

Speaking of computers, this is where we write now. Like it or not. No one except Taylor Swift’s ex is using a typewriter for their term paper any more. So this layer is built to represent the technical aspect of writing. The spellcheck, the paraphraser, the citation finder, anything that’s digital that helps you write. We wanted to develop something that could really morph into anything, so we worked with Gavin at Datalands who built not one but two incredible tools in Figma Make. Completely custom, just for Superhuman.

I won’t get too deep into these because I’m sure we could write an entire separate blog post about them and I know that you’ve all got places to be. So the elevator pitch is this:

Tool 1 — Superdots

We wanted to develop a tool that the Superhuman folks could use to turn any image into technical feeling things. Halftones, triangles patterns, ASCII, and even halftone patterns made out of Hero’s cursor shape. It’s really helpful when you’re just trying to have a branded feeling background texture.

Tool 2 — Superflow

This tool was created to make all kinds of patterns and linework. Just by dragging a few sliders you could build a completely custom pattern with a wide rage of shape options and variability in seconds. Then just click one button to export as an .svg.

Huge shout out to Gavin for vibe coding these things. Truly opened my eyes to the future of tool generation. We’re using new tools to create even newer tools. It’s messy, it’s awkward at times, and most times it crashes our Figma files because there are too many points. But it felt exciting and it felt like magic. Very interested to see how we work this into the future of the studio.

04. Tonal Layer — This is all about vibe. It makes the writing worth reading.

The one thing that AI fumbles on pretty often is tone. And tone matters so much, that’s why you’re reading this post right now…because I don’t write like a computer. (What if I’ve been using AI to write these all along? JK AI could never write like me, these are mostly pure stream of consciousness ramblings over the course of two weeks. No ROI, no measurable statistics, just me and my fingers trying our best to get an idea out.)

Anyway, for this tone section we built ANOTHER tool. This time just some good old fashioned Photoshop adjustment layers. Unsplash photo + gradient mask + blur + noise. We were looking to add a layer that feels like the tone you’re looking to convey. The tone is like the icing on top of the ideation process, it’s what makes the writing digestible. It’s the mood, it’s the emotion, it’s the vibe. So we basically just made a vibe generator.

05. Output Layer — The finished piece in its final form.

And in the end it doesn’t even matter — Linkin Park. How wrong you are Linkin Park. In the actual end there’s text: a document, a manifesto, a script, a dissertation, an argument, a list, a love note. Everything results in words on a page. So the final layer is just that. The polished end of the creative writing process. We wanted to use text as texture in this final layer. So you can see each step is building to this moment.

Our team built dozens of these layered brand stories—each one with a different person and different layers throughout, telling the story of a piece of writing going through all the phases. But a brand isn’t entirely made up of marquee moments, it’s built on banner ads and website landing pages and social media. And this layer system also gives the Superhuman team a very deep toolkit to pull from for those smaller moments, too. Need a vibey background to put behind some abstract UI? Tonal layer to the rescue. Need to add a sense of precision and visual interest to your slide deck? Try a technical layer.

It’s an incredibly powerful (and incredibly complex) brand system. The asset buildout was no joke. And the work is still evolving. Every time we go to make a new brand execution, we find ourselves with more questions about how the layers can interact and how far they can flex while still being on brand. For us, that’s incredibly exciting, because it gives the brand space to evolve along with the product.

Coming soon to a screen near you!

The Superhuman product team are working tirelessly to build an experience that fits seamlessly into your life and work. I can’t wait to try it out myself. Maybe it will help make these case studies a bit more concise and digestible?? Who knows! The product will be fully rolling out to the public in 2026, we’re so hyped to hear what you all think.

This project was by far one of the most in depth and challenging projects S&D has ever worked on. Everything you see here is just the tip of the iceberg of the work that was done. We met with the Superhuman team every Thursday for about 6 months. We had in-person, two-day work sessions at the Superhuman offices in San Francisco, then in our studio in Philly. For every design made there were 12 that didn’t make the cut. Hundreds of typefaces explored and deeply inspected. Dozens of color palettes built and tested and tweaked and rebuilt. So many motion tests to push the limits on what Hero can and cannot do. Deep thinking that sometimes hurt my brain. Truly an all hands (and eyes, and ears, and brains) on deck situation. We’re so proud of this work and hope that you all give it a try to see how you—a regular normal person—can become Superhuman.

None of this would have been possible without the support of the tireless creative team over at Superhuman. We got to work with design legends like Jessica Svendson and Angy Che. Then we got to hand things off and watch the magic unfold as folks like Leah Pincsak and Rebecca McMillin rolled this work out across a million different surfaces and executions.

Tons of credit goes to the full design team: Collin Whitehead, Leah Pincsak, Rebecca McMillin, Kyle Howard, Jessica Svendson, Angy Che, Erin Dame, Jonathan Larson, Sara Jacczak, Claire Rosas, James Fleming, Tammy Sun.

And of course this was a fulllllll team effort on our side, everyone pitched in and did what they do best.

Literally Everything: Chara Smith
Creative Direction: Mike & Chara Smith
Symbol: Mike Smith + Summer McClure + Tully Ryan
Wordmark: Dayan D’Aniello + Mike Smith
Type Systems: Dayan D’Aniello
Art Direction: Summer McClure + Gavin Potenza
Icons & Illustration: Summer McClure + Tully Ryan
Animation Support & Brand Support: Tully Ryan + Caleb Sun

Plus some major help from these incredible folks:

Animation: Justin Lawes
Sound Design: Upright T-Rex Music
Brand & Vibe Tools: Gavin Potenza
Custom Typography: Luzi Type
UI Icons: Helena Zhang
Bumper Animation: Brent Clouse

Press: If you want to use any of the images from this case study here’s a link for you. Or reach out via email to chara@smith-diction.com.

Did you like this project? Do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks, especially if you really love what you do.

Branding Superhuman (and Grammarly and Coda) was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design that honors the earth, the region, and the roots.

Ever since I was a tiny baby, I knew I wanted to make a brand for a wine company. And in August 2023, my dream became a reality in the form of an email from Justin Dusett, and Seb & Colleen Hardy from Living Roots. They were opening a new tasting room in the Finger Lakes and needed a brand refresh to match the vibe of the new space. There was only one catch—we had to pick all the typefaces before we knew what the full brand was going to be. How would that turn out? We were just as curious then as you are now.

I’m going to give you a heads up right here, right now: this is a loooonnnng one, so here’s the TLDR:

Living Roots is a winery in the Finger Lakes (USA) & the Adelaide Hills (AUS) that’s the brain child of Colleen and Seb Hardy. Seb is an incredible 6th generation winemaker who‘s looking to push the boundaries on what’s possible with wine.

The logo is what we’ve been calling a story symbol, which shows all the different pieces of the brand story/history in a sort of hieroglyph-y way. It can be set horizontally or stacked vertically, leading to endless flexibility and variations.

We designed a variable label system acknowledging the unique soil profile of each region. Each wine also has a unique rock shape on the label, showing off their plethora of varieties in a quick and easy-to-see way.

We also made a quirky Sasquatch mascot that adds a playfulness and lightness to the otherwise serious brand.

Jesus, I can’t even make my TL:DR short. I don’t know why I am this way.

Understated, yet elevated.

Back to the TL part: the new Living Roots tasting room is breathtaking. It feels so warm and inviting, with living room areas and a fireplace, but it’s also light and airy, with a cathedral ceiling and a giant wall of windows that offers a majestic view of Keuka Lake. When I was there taking photos almost every single person said, “Woooow, this is so stunning,” as they walked through the door. Feels good man.

The folks at Living Roots are setting a new bar for design and ~*ViBe*~ for the Finger Lakes region. Not too stuffy and hoity toity, but also not a hole in the wall with wine kegs as tables either. Honestly just the perfect blend of elevated, yet cozy.

A short story in a million parts over hundreds of years.

When you start working on a wine client, you cross your fingers and hope to hell that the wine is actually good. And honestly — this post is not sponsored in any way—we’ve been having a hard time drinking anything else since tasting Living Roots. It’s that good. Truly on another level. That made our job easier, because I sure as shit don’t know how to make good tasting wine. They had already done all the hard work, we just needed to put it in a pretty bottle.

This isn’t some venture backed CPG side project either — the co-owner, Seb Hardy, is a sixth generation winemaker. His family has been making wine in Australia since the 1800s. No exaggeration, hundreds of years. So he’s got wine in his DNA. And they lent us some of the family’s history books to prove it.

But, despite all that history, when Seb and Colleen got together, they had an idea that they wanted to do their own thing — branch out from the family business and make a few more experimental kinds of wines in addition to the more traditional stuff.

That’s why they founded Living Roots, a name that suggests history is a constantly living, breathing, and evolving thing. Not just rooted in tradition.

It’s not the kind of experimental wine where everyone winces while tasting it, pretending it’s good just because it’s weird. Seb’s experimental stuff is still incredibly solid, because he’s got the essentials of winemaking etched into his being. He can break all the rules, because he knows which rules are important and which ones are just tradition.

Listening to him talk about wine you’re like…ohhh he knows EVERYTHING. Not just in a snooty sommelier way, but in like, he can tell you the makeup of the soil and the timing of the frost that made a certain vintage come out a certain way. It’s wild to watch, and honestly truly inspiring to see someone be so wholly dedicated to their craft.

We heard you like logos so we put four logos in your logo! Now you actually have too many logos.

One of the most interesting things about Living Roots is that they make wine on two continents: North America (in the Finger Lakes) and Australia (in the Adelaide Hills).

You might be thinking, “Wow, I don’t care!”

But hang on now, it’s interesting — because if you’ve ever been to a wine tasting in the Finger Lakes you know they specialize in sweet bright whites, and mayyyyybe leave a bit to be desired with their deeper reds. They just don’t have the depth you expect.

Living Roots makes their reds in Australia and ships them to the US. So you can get some nice earthy reds that you just can’t get anywhere else in the Finger Lakes.

I knew I needed to convey this very important detail, not just in some supporting text, but within the brand symbol itself…somehow.

How do you fit two continents and six generations of winemaking into a single logo?

We started out just painting random symbols. Water to represent the lakes, mountains to represent the hills, round grape shapes, tendrils, sunsets, roots, you name it. Just free-flowing anything and everything to see if something would stick. We found a few good shapes, but nothing that could really tell the whole brand story in one solid symbol.

Then we thought, what if there simply isn’t just one symbol that can represent this brand. What if it’s a symbol made of symbols?!?!?

Once I got over the idea that I needed a single icon to represent everything, it unlocked an entirely new angle. What if we treated this logo like hieroglyphs? What if we could represent every part of their story? The locations, the product, the history, the name?

The second we stacked all of the symbols on top of each other, it was one of those moments where your heart skips a beat and you realize…

This is it. This feels new. This is exciting.

Ever since we made this story symbol, I have not stopped talking about it. At logo kickoffs I keep suggesting, “Do you think we should do another story symbol guys???” And honestly, it hasn’t worked since. But we’ll keep trying anyway.

To see why the Living Roots team wanted to spruce up their identity a bit, just look at what their previous logo looked like below. The original one evokes the feeling of a certain era. Maybe Mumford and Sons is playing on Pandora radio. The utensils are in Mason jars. Someone at the bar is definitely wearing suspenders. The logo was kinda boxing them in — in a bad way. They needed something that would give them more space to move into higher end wines, but without getting fussy or overdone. We wanted to make something that you can’t quite put a finger on timewise. Not old, but not necessarily modern either. Maybe we’ve changed the radio to a Sigur Rós station or something?

And because of the new logo’s flexibility, we’re hoping it will stand the test of time. No matter how their business changes or grows, we want this story symbol to grow and change with them.

How flexible is too flexible?

…is a question we probably should have asked, but we didn’t!

We always love giving clients flexible brand systems…but this one, if we’re being honest, might borderline on too flexible.

The logo elements can live in a line for a nice horizontal lockup, or they can be pulled together into an oval for a nice tight mark. And either option works in a ton of different lockups with the wordmark.

And if you thought that was enough, you thought wrong! The story elements can also be broken apart and reconfigured in other ways too.

Circular badges. Patterns. Borders. You name it. We even set up a sort of rebus-like situation where the symbols are interspersed into a paragraph to add depth to their meaning. No limits on this one. It keeps the brand feeling fresh and flexible, even if saving all of them out was a bit of a nightmare lol.

It kinda reminded us of the way Seb makes wine. He pays attention to every detail. He’s not afraid to throw out the winemaking textbook and try something different — not because he’s naïve, but because he’s memorized the whole freakin book — heck, his family wrote it. And when you know the rules like the back of your hand, that gives you a bit more leeway to break them, ya know? So why not bring that rule-breaking mentality into the identity as well? Who needs one logo when you can have 45?!

But even with seven thousand logo lockup options, we also wanted to make sure the core mark could stand alone — clean and confident — on something like a wine glass.

A fun easter egg is that the logo on their glasses is positioned so that the top of the roots icon is the guide line for their 6 oz pour. Logo design as utility baby!

Making work that feels mysterious and important.

Building a brand is such an interesting challenge—you’re trying to make something entirely new and original, while also making something that instantly feels familiar. Hitting that balance is kind of a mysterious process, but when it hits, it hits as hard as the cover of a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper with rainbows and dolphins exploding from a sunset.

The wild thing is, I can remember the exact moment when I painted each individual symbol for this logo. There would just be something about the way the ink sloshed or the way the line would go from thick to thin, making something that felt like the opposite of the perfect shapes made with a computer.

Letting go of that polished perfection in favor of something a little more natural felt so right for this brand.

It’s never been easier to make beautiful things quickly. But it’s never been harder to make sure that those beautiful things actually have some heart in them.

So I say to you, be free my children! Let go of the mouse for a minute! Stop tweeting about RIP this or RIP that. Get back to pen and paper!!!

…and then scanners, and then photoshop levels, and then live trace in Illustrator. WHAT CAN I SAY IT’S A PROCESS PEOPLE!

The older I get, the more obsessed with asymmetrical logos I become. I live for a wobbly line. I love getting back into fluid movement as a means to showcase humanity. Almost every part of the winemaking process is done by hand, so why not pull that concept through to the entire identity as well?

I’m so unique!! I can’t be labeled!!

Not gonna lie, this wasn’t our first pass at these wine labels. Nor was it our second. We worked on these labels for about 3 or 4 months after the identity was approved, and it was really really tricky to make something that felt right. (Why was it so tricky, you wonder!? So glad you didn’t ask, because we’ll tell you anyway.)

Before we dive into the new wine labels, let’s talk about the previous ones. They used a watercolor background that reflected the soil profile of each wine-growing region. Great concept, and the Living Roots team loved the paintings. But they were very dark. They made the wines feel moody, heavy, and almost ominous. They felt nothing at all like the bright wines inside, or the warm, inviting, kind people behind the brand either.

But we loved the way they represented the soil profiles, and also loved the metallic foil of the wordmark—so we wanted to bring both of those forward as a kind of homage to the original labels. Something that their die-hard customers would view as a classy evolution.

Everything else was on the table for an update.

Let’s talk about what we changed:

Celebrating soil profiles.

As we mentioned, we wanted to continue honoring the soil profiles, while making it feel lighter and airier. We did that by adding an overlapping watercolor texture that tied to the blue-grey color of shale found in the Finger Lakes and the orange clay color of soil in the Adelaide Hills. We even nodded toward the different locations by swapping the soil color placement to correspond to the Northern Hemisphere (shale on the top) and the Southern Hemisphere (clay on the bottom).

Showcasing variety at a glance.

Living Roots has a massive catalog of really diverse wines and their previous system wasn’t showing off the range. Every wine felt nearly identical. We wanted to make each variety feel unique while also fitting into an overall system. So we developed this idea that each wine variety would have its own rock shape, which the watercolor texture lives in. So even from a distance, you can instantly see how massive the catalog is.

Bringing the names front and center.

The previous labels also had a hierarchy problem, with the name of the wine tucked away on the side — which meant you actually couldn’t see the variety on the shelf. Not ideal for easy shopping. So we brought the name front and center. And it was an unexpected challenge, because just when you thought you’d cracked it, a name like Gewürztraminer or Depths of the Earth Red Blend would show up and completely obliterate the system.

Other fun little devil-y details:

Floating rock shaped containers.

Instead of treating the alcohol content and milliliters like an afterthought, we gave them each their own little floating rock shapes that tie to the overall visual design language.

Brand history rebus paragraph.

To drive home the meaning of the story symbols, we included a short paragraph on the side that subtly tells people exactly what the symbols represent without beating them over the head with it.

Origin postage stamp.

We added a fun USA x AUS postage stamp that lets people know that Living Roots is more than just a Finger Lakes winery. This piece of their story was missing from the previous labels and is honestly super important. So we wanted to make sure we gave it a little nod.

Overall, our goal was for the new labels to deeply represent the care Seb & Col put into making wine, while also feeling lighter and easier to digest at a glance.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the wine aisle and been like, oh dangggggit which kind of wine do I like again? Pinot Grigio orrrrr Sauvignon Blanc??? Uhhhh guess I’ll just get both. Then I go home and punish my taste buds with a Pinot Grigio that tastes like pure pool water. Absolutely disgusting.

Any second that people might need to turn your label to read the name is a dangerous game to play. We wanted to show customers everything at once (but without being overwhelming).

We thought if we could bake all this beautiful meaning into these labels, it would let anyone show that they’re a true fan by launching into a conversation about soil profiles and hemispheres when you’re all three glasses deep and everyone wants you to stop talking about the label and just pour the damn wine.

Long live the hierarchy (aka, type systems).

Fun fact: The Living Roots folks needed to open the new tasting room before we were finished with the brand refresh. So they asked us if we could pick brand typography and design out all the on-site signage first — then develop the brand afterward. And we were like uhhhhhh let’s give it a shot! Will it work out? Who knows! Maybe????

So we wung it…just kidding, we very strategically and methodically picked three brand typefaces: Auroc, Caliste, and Rockhill. And they made for beautiful signage and also perfectly fit into the brand we built later with no troubles at all! We definitely didn’t discover too late that Auroc is super spacey and needs to have every letter hand kerned, very much not a pain in the ass.

All jokes aside, we did pick these for a reason. Not only does each one feel just right for the brand, they also do a wonderful job of setting wildly different tones depending on the hierarchy.

Auroc

When Auroc is the lead typeface — like on wine labels — it creates a classy humanist kind of vibe. It’s got hard edges and cuts that feel elevated, yet unassuming. It’s the perfect mirror to Seb’s approach to winemaking. It’s got classy bones balanced with earthiness and a touch of unconventionality.

Rockhill

We only use Rockhill in its “rough” style, and when we bring it to the forefront, it adds an entirely new dynamic to the overall system. Living Roots has a session line of wines that has a lower alcohol content so we decided to use Rockhill as the primary font on these labels to demonstrate a more approachable and easy-going attitude. It’s got a rustic quality that sort of tempers the fanciness of the other type in the system.

Caliste

This typeface is absolutely gorgeous and a joy to use. When it leads, it brings an immediate sense of refinement to the table. We try not to overuse it in the brand because we don’t want to lean too hard into that inaccessible wine world.

We like to use it for tiny details that bring a smile to your face when you see them, like the Th ligature in The and the swoopy L in mL on the front of the bottle. It’s also perfect for numbers, which it turns out there’s a lot of numbers in wine design systems.

It’s been so wild to develop a brand while sort of backing into pre-selected typefaces. I wouldn’t recommend it. But it was a fun challenge that actually worked out really well in the end kinda because we had no other option but to make it work.

Using three typefaces and creating a bunch of different sub-brands within the parent brand was also really eye-opening, and we really got to see how just changing the size of a typeface can shift the entire vibe of a layout into a completely different visual genre.

This would be a great exercise for any teacher/student out there. See how many unique brands you could create using just two or three different typefaces.

Pretty picture intermission.

Right after we finished the brand concept, we dove headfirst into a mountain of brand collateral that needed to be updated. Truly one of the most extensive brand rollouts we’ve ever handled. Tasting room signage, menus, posters, merch, bumper stickers, tech sheets, frisbees, business cards, presentation decks, trivia templates, matchbooks, calendars, team training materials, dozens of wine labels, the list goes on and on.

I could write many many paragraphs explaining each of these pieces, but we’re already clocking this case study at a whopping 19-minute read so we’ll make this a pretty picture intermission.

What’s a brand without a mascot?

Whenever we’re working on a new brand identity, we always like to toss in one or two ideas that push past typical expectations. Something the client won’t even know is coming that will hopefully wow them, make them smile, or just feel fresh and new.

This is where we create the work that we really want to be known for. Sometimes it’s an excuse to try a technique we’ve been wanting to test out. Sometimes we use it as an opportunity to collaborate with a friend we’ve been dying to work with. Sometimes we use it as a moment to bring some surprise and delight to the brand. A lot of the time it borders on impractical, but hey, I never want to be the studio that just does the bare minimum.

So anyway, we created this mischievous mascot. Say hello to Rooty.

Who’s Rooty, you ask? Well, it’s a yeti/sasquatch made of grape vines, obviously. And naturally he’s a menace around the winery who likes to run away with grapes and steal wine from the cellar.

We collaborated with Jeffrey Phillips on this one because he’s Australian. JK, it’s because I absolutely love his illustration style. His line quality matched the inkiness of the logo and he just brings an inherently human joyful quality to every one of his characters, even when they are grape-vine yetis. We sent him the worst concept sketch in the world and he turned it into something wonderfully magical.

Luckily for us, the client actually LOVED this little bud — and now he shows up all over the place: on matchbooks, merch, gift cards, coloring pages, you name it. And we gotta say, as much as the Living Roots team takes their wine seriously, they’ve really embraced the lighter side of the brand, too.

Seeing this mascot around the tasting room in Keuka has been SO fun. I’m trying to convince them to make an oversized wood cutout of him that they can hide around the vineyard so people can try to spot him while sipping their sparkling rosé.

Should we get him made into a life-sized Gritty-like suit where he can scare all of the customers??? That would be good for business right? RIGHT.

Our relationship with Living Roots is ongoing, so I’m sure we’ll be adding more to this post as we make more things for them. Overall, as I look back on this project I’m just so grateful that Seb and Colleen trusted us with their brand and let us go a little wild with it.

They surely didn’t have to say yes to an unhinged variable logo and they absolutely didn’t need this weird little mascot, but they embraced every piece of the brand that we presented and are running with it on a daily basis.

It’s not lost on me that we’re so lucky to get the opportunity to work with people that care as deeply about their craft as we care about ours. When we get together with these kinds of folks it feels electric and it makes us want to give them the world. Their dedication and passion is contagious and pushes us to create something really special and full of love.

Thanks to Seb and Col for trusting the vision and being great collaborators. Thanks Justin Dusett for going to bat for us and being our guiding support through all of this. You guys are incredible.

PS: If you want to use any of the images from this case study here’s a link for you.

Did you like this project? Do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks especially if you really love what you do.

Design Team: Mike Smith, Dayan D’Aniello, Summer McClure
Character Illustration: Jeffery Phillips
Character Animation: James Dybvig
Brand Animation: Tully Ryan
Brand & Production Manager: Chara Smith

Branding Living Roots Wine & Co. was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Another year, another recap. This year tested a lot of limits for us. It started off slow. Like…..I guess the robot uprising is here, kind of slow. And honestly, it shook us quite a bit. We were second guessing our process, we were in new business meetings more than we were designing, things got gnarly. But we kept on trucking, because that’s all you can do and if we’re looking for the silver lining, the change of pace forced us to evolve a bit. We rebuilt and streamlined our proposal process from the ground up. We can now turn around pretty much any proposal in less than 24 hours. Which you’re saying, duh, that’s how it should be? Yes. I agree. But it’s easier said than done for a small studio, where just a handful of us are doing everything for everyone at all times.

We learned a lot about what we wanted from our studio this year. We learned that we didn’t want to grow just for the sake of growing. We learned a lot about who we were up against. We saw some proposals that had us a bit baffled. We learned that no matter what, we’re always going to be honest, even if it doesn’t align with the best monetary decisions. We learned that it’s important to step away when your gut tells you to. And that some time in the woods is good for every part of your soul.

All this being said, you might think we didn’t do much work this year. But actually, it’s the opposite. When things picked up after the lull, they reallllly picked up. We worked on a lot of stuff. More stuff than I even remembered working on. Did I black out from March to June? Most likely. But I’m so proud to show off this work and so proud of the team that made it all. We’d be nothing without Summer and Dayan, and we’re endlessly grateful to them, every day.

One last note before we dive in: This post isn’t as funny as usual, and it’s not the usual behind-the-scenes kinda vibe of our normal case studies either. So feel free to blast through and just look at all the pretty pictures.

January

The George

This project got the whole team excited. We’re not a competitive studio in any way—in fact most of the brands we make are touched by every person on the team at some point. But this project had each of us trying our best to make our direction win. We went way too hard and made way too much for a smaller sized client, but we literally couldn’t stop making stuff. I made a completely custom wordmark. Dayan was making brass plate wayfinding mockups. Summer was making insane floral illustrations inspired by the 19th Century ironwork in the space itself.

For the sake of transparency, and to show an even more behind the scenes look at our process I shared a link to the Figma file for this project, and people went wild in there! There were like 300 people poking around at any given moment for at least a week. Sadly, we recently chatted with the folks at The George and this cute little hotel project hit some snags in the financing/permitting phase, and the actual buildout has been put on hold. But who knows! Maybe someone will buy the property and keep the brand for whatever the space eventually becomes.

41 West

We took this project on as a sprint in December of 2023 but we didn’t publish the work until 2024 so I’ll just include it here anyway, even if it’s cheating a little bit.

This work was super fun to make. When we met Preston at 41 West, things clicked so quickly. We immediately got to talking about how when you’re on a production set, you’re surrounded by all these endlessly interesting characters. So we wanted to create a brand that paid homage to all those talented weirdos on a set. We paired a fun illustrated cast of characters with a vintage wordmark that looks like it could be from an old TV station in the ‘60s.

We even got our buddy James Dybvig to animate one of them, which is always a treat. He has such a good sense of the tiny little movements, like that hat flick, that make the animation so much more quirky and human.

February

Ingredient AI

Working with Akash and Gordon at Ingredient AI was a total whirlwind. They came to us and asked if we could make a brand, throw up a splash page, make an explainer video, and think of a cool print piece that they could take to a conference all within about 5 weeks. It was an insanely wild ride and I don’t think we’ll ever do it again, but I’m so proud of the work that came out of it. And I’m happy to be still working with the Ingredient folks at a much more normal pace these days haha.

Thanks goes to Hunter Thompson for the lightning fast webflow dev, Brent Clouse for the speedy video animation, Scott McClelland for the quick turnaround on a dope embossed holographic foil print piece (Did we letterpress a gold foil QR code? Yes.), and the full S&D team for being all hands on deck to get this brand over the finish line. Special shoutout to Trevor Rogers for the intro, too.

Check out the site at ingredient-ai.com

March

Gateway Garden Center

We were approached by the lovely folks at a local garden center who asked us to help them with a new sign—and it quickly turned into an entire rebranding project. Gateway Garden Center has been a mainstay of the local native plant business since 1979. So it’s easy to imagine that their logo, and brand, and yes, their big sign out front—all needed a refresh. We wanted to honor their legacy, while also making their brand feel as lively as the plants they carry.

So we worked with Simon Walker to develop a floral drop cap G that just felt so so perfect. We had a ton of fun slapping that G on all kinds of signage, stickers, tee shirts, postcards, and more. We also got to use Rebond as a brand typeface which I’ve been trying to use for the past two years and it was glorious.

Guilded Home

We worked with the lovely and absolutely hilarious duo, Kristen and Mae, from Guilded Home to give them a new brand identity as they joined their two separate interior design studios into one. We went for a super classy approach that felt as elegant as the interiors that they’re known for.

Dayan designed a beautiful floral keyhole monogram. Big year for florals, and a big year for keyholes for us, too. But anyway, we leaned into the GH keyhole as a signature brand element, kind of reminiscent of that moment when you finally unlock the door and cross the threshold into a new, beautiful home that’s been thoughtfully designed just for you.

Continuum

Our old buddy Tom Wingert (who we’ve known for at least a decade and loved working with in the past) was on the very cusp of opening a new kind of VIP fitness club in NYC called Continuum when he asked us for a little help. He needed a little brand extension to his original visual identity—making sure the vibe was built to match the absolutely incredible space. We took what he had and added some new type, expanded the color palette, and built a fancy looking Google Slides deck so he could go out and convince people to feel confident dropping $10K a month on an over-the-top gym membership.

April

Anterior

Most people don’t know this, but before Chara joined S&D full time, she worked in pharma advertising for a few years. So when Anterior came to us to help them brand their medical AI tool for payor organizations, Chara actually knew exactly what they were talking about. I, on the other hand, did not.

If you want to take a deeper dive into this work we wrote up a full case study for this project which you can read here. Overall, we just loved working with the Anterior team so much. They were so smart and so decisive. They have taken the brand and really run with it over this past year. Plus they just started building out their internal design team and we’re so excited to see them grow. Can’t wait to see what they have in store for 2025.

May

Top Secret Project

I can’t say or show much of this project yet. But this was one of those things that once you get the call, you make it happen, no matter what else is going on. We worked on this for a solid two months, and in the most non-exaggerating way possible, I think it’s going to change the world. Keep your eye out for this symbol in the next month or so. You’ll want to be part of it.

Shout out to Summer for the amazing logo and Justin Lawes who made it glassy and floaty.

July

Living Roots

I showed off a little bit of this work in the recap of 2023 and believe it or not I’m still working on the full case study for this brand. This Summer we had a wonderful time visiting the Living Roots tasting room on Keuka Lake to chat with owners Seb & Col Hardy, and design bud Justin Dusett. We absolutely loved seeing the brand in action all throughout the space. The coolest thing was probably seeing our hand-painted logo screenprinted on all the glasses everywhere. Fun fact: the top of the root symbol in the logo is the 8oz pour line. Practical AND pretty. You can have it all.

This was a literal bucket list, dream project for me and I’m so proud of this work, so I’m being extra picky about what goes in the case study. But I promise, you’ll see the whole thing in 2025. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever made.

Minted New York

This year we only took on one design sprint and boy did we pick the perfect one. Marcus Milione reached out to us for a brand refresh for his company Minted New York and after chatting, we both agreed that the full brand process would have been overkill for what they were looking for. So I floated the idea of a sprint but told him that it comes with a lot of risk, to which he responded: I generally love risk.

And that, my friends, is how you get us fully on board.

The Minted crew was looking for a brand refresh that could take them into more of a sportswear angle. They kinda just needed a logo that could feel at home on the side of a sneaker, or tiny on the corner of a pair of running shorts. So we landed on this starting block M symbol that just felt so right. It’s got the weight to be embroidered onto literally anything, but also has the momentum that keeps the brand feeling fresh and fast.

August

Solana

This was a big one for us this year. The folks at Solana Mobile asked if we could help them come up with an identity for their new phone, the Solana Seeker.

They wanted a brand that felt more accessible than most other crypto brands. Something that didn’t feel overwhelmingly neon or like you were hacking into a mainframe. So we landed on this restrained Seeker wordmark with a custom “r” and also updated their color palette to feel like a grown up version of Solana’s regular brand colors. Something that felt a little more refined and also a little more accessible for maybe the not-entirely-sold-on-crypto crowd. Clean and crisp.

September

Alma

This was a fun one because it pushed us into a brand new medium: AI. We hadn’t used AI seriously in our workflow up until this point, so it was a bit of an adjustment. It took quite some time to wrangle, but it was really fun when we figured it out, and unlocked a lot of doors that I don’t think would have been possible for a studio of our size even a year ago.

We wrote a full case study on this project, in case you’d like to see and read more about the nitty gritty of what went into creating this identity.

October

Perplexity Merch

We actually worked on these merch designs over a year ago, but it hit the streets this year, so it only felt right to add it to the recap. We worked with Phi and Henry to design the first drop of Perplexity merch and truthfully, we were only a very tiny piece of this puzzle. Phi is a legend when it comes to making merch that feels extremely high quality. He took our designs and 10x’d them into these pieces that have everyone talking. So proud to still be a tiny piece of the Perplexity rocket ship. Go get yourself a Know it All hat.

November

Sotto

This was yet another brand that we made last year, but we were asked to keep it under our hats for a while since production is still underway. So we just announced it this year. We created this brand for Sotto, which is a new kind of light-weight, soft spoken, apartment friendly piano. We wanted to create a symbol that nodded towards the uniqueness of the instrument, so we made this 7-seeded (nod towards the notes A,B,C,D,E,F,G) dandelion logo that feels as soft as the piano sounds.

We had a ton of fun with the restraint of this brand and we got to create things that felt almost like visual poetry.

Oregon Water Extremes

We got to close out the year with a quick feel good project for Oregon Water Extremes. We were asked to create an identity for a glacier and climate researcher starting a new institute at the University of Oregon. They needed to be able to slap a sticker on a crate of gear or send research reports to the government and feel like they should be taken seriously.

We landed on this Mountains + Glacier + Water logo that combines every area of their research into one tight symbol. We love that it could feel at home on letterhead, or on the side of a giant oceanliner.

Life outside of the studio.

In 2023, we won a Best of Philly award for Logo Design but they were holding off on the award ceremony until 2024 to celebrate their 50th anniversary. So Mom and Dad got dressed up and hung out with the Phanatic, Gritty, the Mummers, and literally the best chefs in Philly for one night at the gorgeous Art Museum. It was super fun and also extremely delicious. I hope we win more awards so we can eat more really nice snacks in pretty places.

S&D Shop

Every year Chara and I sit down and talk about what we want to be working on in the next year and last year I said to her, “I really just want to open a shop so I can make a bunch of posters and other dumb stuff.” This was the first year that we took that seriously. I sat down and cracked open Big Cartel and set up a shop in about an hour.

Just having the ability to sell dumb stuff inspired me to make a lot of dumb stuff, like our Worm Hat for example. I also made some posters about depression and tote bags about giving me a break.

Take a peak at our ever-evolving shop here.

Smith & Diction Nine Year Anniversary Poster

This was our NINE year anniversary so we put together a poster to commemorate the occasion. It showed off some of our most favorite logos and doodles we’ve come up with over the years, opening up to a large poster in the middle that says “Solid as a stone. Free as a river.” This was a metaphor that my therapist said to me once as I was dealing with some gnarly anxiety.

When you’re going through it and the pressure starts to stack up and anxiety creeps in, just close your eyes and imagine you’re a stone in a river. The stone doesn’t worry about the river washing over it, it just exists.

There are times in your life when you’re the stone — solid, rooted, unmoving. And there are times when you are the river — wild, free, and in constant motion.

A Brotherly Love Pennant

While we were working on the Welcome to Philly mural outside the Art Museum last year, we made this liberty bell badge that just begged to be put on a pennant. So this year, we hit up Oxford Pennant and did just that. We made some really high quality pennants to celebrate the best city in the world: Philadelphia.

Here’s the link to scoop one for yourself if you love Philly. Or if you hate Philly and want to burn it, you can purchase it here as well. No judgment. Go Birds. Dallas sux.

We made Creative Boom’s 25 most popular design studios list.

This one really took me by surprise. Honestly, it meant the world to me. Building a small studio exactly the way that I want is not the easiest thing to do. Every day I think, am I doing this all wrong? Should I be hiring more people and growing? Should I change my process? Is this the best way to make a brand? And truthfully I don’t think there will ever be a solid answer to any of those questions, but the fact that a bunch of people out there think we’re doing something right and are really into our work, that’s all that I need to keep going. A studio of five people being on the same list as Pentagram? As Collins? As Porta Rocha? As Wolff Olins? WHAT? That’s wild. So if you voted for us for this and you’re reading this, thanks for making my year. I really needed it and really appreciate it.

Hotlist 2025: the 25 most popular design studios, as voted for by their peers

Low-key Legends Podcast

We don’t go on podcasts very often because honestly, who wants to hear from us? I’d rather just do the work. But apparently a lot of you DID want to hear from us haha. It was so fun talking to Britton about everything from AI workflows to how reading fiction books can make you a better designer.

We have a few more speaking gigs/podcasts lined up for 2025 and can’t wait to share more hot takes with you all in the future. There are also a few more projects that are dropping next year that we absolutely cannot wait to share with you all. Like, really really can’t wait.

Thanks for reading, looking, skimming, whatever-ing you did to get this far. I appreciate the support and hope to keep writing our really long winded case studies for a long time to come. If I ever fall off, it’s up to you to hold me accountable.

See ya in 2025.

2024 Smith & Diction Year in Review was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introducing the world’s first nutrition companion.

It’s the week after Thanksgiving as I’m hitting publish on this case study. The time of year where families of all shapes, sizes, cultures, and dietary restrictions gather around the table to share a meal. The last thing that’s probably on your mind right now is tracking what you just ate or are planning to eat over the next month. So I figured it’s the *perfect time* to drop a case study on a food tracking companion app thing! Just bookmark this and come back to it on January 1st.

Let’s get this out of the way, food tracking is boring, tedious, and most of the time very bland.

It needs to be said. These apps are usually designed to be just as bland as the meals they’re tracking. Purely a transaction, with little to no soul involved. But in an ideal world, you should be able to track the foods that you alsoooo actually enjoy eating. Foods that have flavor. Foods that give you more than just energy, they give you life.

Well, dream no longer abs seeking smoothie guzzler. Sign up for the beta of Alma today. (At the time of writing, this is a limited beta. But you can sign up for the waitlist for the early 2025 launch.)

Bringing soul to the table.

I’ll admit when we met Rami Alhamad and Adam Noffsinger from Alma, they had to do some convincing to get us on board. Because, like we mentioned above, this space is crowded and most of what’s out there is a bit lame. But as we got deeper into what they were offering, it became more about culture and the celebration of food. Rami mentioned that if you eat Indian or Ethiopian food, it’s almost impossible to log your meals on the other apps. And most of the time people drop off, because the apps make them feel guilty for not logging consistently.

Alma is building a nutrition companion that meets you where you are and tracks actual imperfect human activity, not the gym rat robot that these other apps seem to assume their users are. You contain multitudes, and cheese.

The more we thought about it, the more we felt like this is the perfect space to inject some soul and liveliness. This is where it will be noticed most. It’s much easier to stand out in a sea of bland with a really good brand.

It wouldn’t be an app in 2024 without AI!

Nutrition tracking apps are pretty much worthless if you’re not using them every day. So the Alma folks wanted to use warmth and friendliness of their brand to build a nutrition companion app that encourages people rather than guilts them into using it on the regular.

They use AI to help fill in the gaps when logging, making it super easy to catch up when you’ve fallen off the wagon for a bit. They also use AI to suggest customized recipes based on your history, goals, and personal preferences. I don’t have any jokes for this paragraph, sorry readers.

A for Alma

When I was younger, so much younger than today. I used to be like…Strategy? Pointless. Positioning? Waste of time. I just wanna make cool logos that look cool. Turns out strategy and positioning are how cool logos get made. Who knew! This became so integral to our process that I married our strategist. And also for other reasons.

For this brand, Chara did such a great job with the positioning that a logo just sort of fell out of it.

A key part of positioning is brand pillars—three attributes that, together, make this offering unique. Like, what makes this special? Usually, one or two pillars are table stakes. But at least one of them has to make you pause for a hot second and say wait, that IS different. For Alma, our brand pillars are: Nutrition Tracking, Personal Insights, and Flavor Discovery. Are other apps doing nutrition tracking? Yes. Do some of them offer AI powered personal insights? A few. But toss flavor discovery in there, and suddenly you’re doing something new.

We use brand pillars as conceptual guidelines and inspiration anytime we’re building a brand—but for this one, we took things a bit further and injected the pillars right into the brand symbol.

Pro tip: it’s easier to sell through a good logo when it’s tied directly to a pre-approved strategy.

When you see the Alma brand symbol, at first glance you might just see some shapes that roughly resemble an A. At second glance you might see a person looking at a recipe book while prepping dinner. At thirrrrd glance, when you look a bit longer, you can see that it’s directly tied to the three pillars. I’m obviously always looking for strategic pillars when I look at logos.

Each logo element represents a pillar. The open journal represents personal insights. The bowl shows how you can discover new flavors with Alma’s recipe suggestion feature. And the circle at the top represents a person, or the tracking macros that are a major part of the product design.

It’s so rare to get three separate symbols in a logo that play nicely together, let alone three symbols that actually mean anything to the company. When Summer made this we all looked at each other and said, “Welp, this is perfect.”

We were so happy with how this symbol turned out, not only because of the symbolism and meaning baked into it, but also because it has a timeless quality that feels like it can outlast any kind of trend. No gloopiness. No 3D. No gradients. Just a really solid classic looking symbol that would feel at home in the 1960s as well as the 2030s. Because—that’s right—we’re only FIVE YEARS AWAY FROM IT BEING 2030?! When I’m reading this in 2030 I’m going to be like wow, what a 2025 thing to say.

Because the logo is broken down into three separate elements, it’s extremely scalable too. It can work massively on the side of a building or teeeeeeny tiny as a favicon. It can even work as a stencil which comes in handy from time to time.

Another bonus is that you can replace each piece of the logo like a collage. You can make the logo out of foods, leaves, paper scraps, bowls, 3D elements, human teeth, and anything else you can imagine. Trust me we tried it all and so has AI.

Collage me like one of your Spanish girls.

You may have noticed by now that collages are a major part of the Alma brand language, and this section is here to tell you why.

Rami and Adam landed on the name Alma, which is Spanish for soul. Rami was telling us about a trip to Spain and how he got swept up in the art, the culture, and the food. He was like, I know this is going to sound crazy but when I close my eyes and think of the Alma brand, it’s very painterly, exciting, and vibrant. Food is art, so why not inject that into the brand?

Easy peasy. I’ll just whip out my brushes and oil paints and get cracking.

One major issue, however, was that the Alma team is planning to include a visual anytime someone adds a meal they’ve eaten into the app. That’s literally thousands of images. Probably millions. The Alma team wanted the app to feel flavorful and fresh, so they didn’t want to buy a standard pack of photos from iStock or wherever. Stock sites are just out here cashing in on the most boring photo of a chicken dinner known to mankind. WELL I SAY, NOT ANYMORE!

Weird but relevant aside, we were introduced to the Alma folks via Colin Dunn from Visual Electric. So as we were thinking about this artistic food angle we were like, hmmmm what if we fire up an AI generator and see what it spits out? If we could wrangle this thing to make food images properly, we could solve the thousands of images problem beautifully.

What came out of this exercise was pure magic. And also some dog shit. But mostly magic.

At the end of the day, isn’t cooking kind of just making a collage out of food?

The first pass was very painterly and normal looking. Pretty, but not ownable in any way and would prob get old fast. In classic AI fashion it started randomly putting stuff in weird places. We almost gave up because it was too inconsistent to actually implement in any kind of responsible way. Then things took a sort of surrealist-ish turn, in a good way.

In a desperate attempt to figure out a solution that actually worked, we started trying all different kinds of filters and prompts, attempting to eliminate all the weird AI misplacements. Then we landed on the idea of collage, and it opened the door to a visual style that became central to the entire brand.

When your final visual is a collage of foods, rather than striving for accurate depictions, it gives a little more grace to a weird stem popping out of a cut tomato, or a watermelon that looks like a sailboat. You’re kinda just like, “Well it’s a collage, it’s supposed to be weird!” So we got to work generating dozens of these things. And well, it just worked. The more we played with it, the better we got at getting the results we needed.

The good, the bad, and the heinous.

We showed this to the Alma folks and they were fully, massively on board. They were SO on board that decided to add Visual Electric-esque collage generation right into Alma. Soon, you’ll be able to enter any kind of recipe into the app, and it will generate a custom collage out of the ingredients. Which is a great feature for a food tracking app that also suggests customized recipes based on your tummy troubles.

The gifs shown here were straight from Visual Electric. Above, you can see it generated some truly unique and beautiful collages that work well for anything brand related.

And here, you can see it also generated some truly heinous and sometimes nightmare-ish stuff as well. AI loves fruits and veggies and has absolutely no idea what to do with raw meat. It throws random eyes in weird places and even a sperm found its way into some sort of granola bar??? Leopard? Sure, toss it in! Could I interest you in some conjoined chicken wings?? With recent advances in genetically engineered food, the conjoined chicken wings don’t seem as dystopian as they should.

The collages were also a nice thing to use as background elements for the app icon. I feel like app icons are getting a little bit more fun and personalized these days so why not add the ability to customize it a bit, while still feeling on brand.

Founding Designers 🤝 Smith & Diction

Side note: this year has been a very interesting one for us from a process perspective. Post Perplexity, we’ve been working more and more with Founding Designers on their brand concepts. It’s honestly been an incredible change of pace for us. We get to hand off identity systems to folks that can then take the work and implement it without too much hand holding.

It’s been an absolute delight, and we hope to do more of this as time goes on. Are you a founding designer reading this? Are you really good with design but have no idea how to make a really solid logo and brand system? Give us a̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ an email. (Please don’t call.)

This kind of partnership has been bringing us more and more into the realm of UI/product design. Most of the time, these founding designers are really good product designers. So when they come to us, they have a lot of the product built and just ask us to help with the sticky spots that could use a hint of brand to help get users through a particular interaction, or to make the experience feel a little bit more special, unexpected, or ownable.

I’ll say this with my full chest, we are not product designers and will never claim to know what we are doing in the product design world. BUT we love looking for those special places in a digital product where we can have a surprise and delight moment with brand. How many times have you seen a dope brand and then the product looked like it was built by a completely different department? We’re trying our best to bring those two things a bit closer together.

All the designs we make in the brand concept phase are just that, concepts. For Alma, we took a stab at a few different ways to treat the product so they could pick which they liked best and run with it on their own.

This has been a great way to test brand typefaces and colors across an entire brand. A bold color or a quirky condensed typeface that looks dope in marketing materials might not even come close to working across product, where you don’t want brand to overpower usability.

Honestly, it’s been an eye-opening experience to think like a product designer lately. When you hand off a brand that has zero consideration on how it might show up in the digital space, it makes total sense as to why the brand might end up feeling disconnected. The digital folks kinda have to decide how it shows up in product on the fly.

Be responsible with your file handoffs kids. Only you can prevent dumpster fires.

This sentiment goes both ways, as they say! We recently got handed a brand from one of “the big boys” that was fully built in Figma. 100% RGB. No print based colors or guidelines at all. And then the client asked us to make a bunch of materials for an event…and so we totally had to make up everything on the spot. Not great Bob.

Speaking of style guides. Does anyone read things?

Making a style guide in the year 2024 is kind of an existential question at this point. Will anyone open it? Where do you make it? Figma? Standards? Illustrator? InDesign? (RIP) How do we define an AI prompt so a team can actually make their own images? Do we select a native font to use in Instagram stories? How important are fallback Google fonts? How do we hand the brand off to an influencer? It seems so silly to try to “define” anything in today’s brand landscape where everything is changing dramatically from day to day. Tools are constantly updating. New tools are popping up literally every single day. Honestly, it’s a bit exhausting.

But when you’re designing a brand and handing off an identity, you sort of need to just pick a moment in time and define that moment as best as you possibly can. The only thing constant is change, so we might as well embrace it.

We usually include the language “This is a style guide, not a rule book” at the beginning to encourage folks to see that any style guide is a living, breathing document that will not be perfect—but it will be a good place to start.

I have to give credit where credit is due, Dayan worked so hard on this document. For the first time ever, we were handing off a brand that incorporated AI generated images. How the hell do you hand something like that off? And I think Dayan did an absolutely wonderful job breaking down all of the little nuances in a digestible way that is super easy to replicate. We included sample prompts and even highlighted the sections that should be edited to get different results in a similar visual style.

I wish I could tell you there was an easy way to get here, but it truly just came from hours (maybe days) of just messing around, prompting anything and everything to see what works. We got it to a place where it can create something that feels on brand a majority of the time, which we are thrilled with.

The Alma brand was a fun one to make and I hope that comes through in the work. I know we’ll prob catch some guff from the purists for using AI imagery, but I like to keep as much of an open mind about new tools as humanly possible. It’s better to try new things than to be that old man yells at cloud meme. I’m super proud of this work and I’m excited to see how it scales up in the future. Maybe I’ll download this app and lose this Lexapro gut I can’t seem to shake.

If you’re interested in trying it out yourself, sign up for the waitlist today at alma.food.

Did you like this project? Do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks. Even if we can’t work with you for some reason, we’ll try to intro you to someone who can.

Symbol & Product Design Concepts: Summer McClure
Wordmark, Brand Design, & Style Guide: Dayan D’Aniello
AI Generation & Motion: Tully Ryan
Brand Design & Creative Direction: Mike Smith
Copywriting & Strategy: Chara Smith

Want to post this work? Here’s a link to all of the press images.

Branding Alma was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medical Insurance? AI? Oh my!

After Perplexity dropped we got a lot of inquiries from other AI companies. Like, a lot a lot. Most of them were very early in their journey and didn’t really know what they were building or who they were building for. They just knew it was going to use AI in some way. The 2024 gold rush is upon us.

We also had some really engaging conversations with folks that were thinking a bit more broadly about AI and its integration into their businesses. Cue, Anterior. Notice it’s not called Anterior AI because that’s not the be-all end-all of their company vision. The AI is just a product within their company. To continue the metaphor, we struck gold.

We met with their team and immediately connected with them. I don’t know if it’s because most of them were British or what but every Zoom call was beyond lovely. Felt like we were just hanging with some mates in a pub havin’ a cheeky pint. JK it was much more professional than that.

Andy, their founding designer, was really open and trusting about our process. Many times during the discovery they said, “We trust your expertise on this.” Music to our ears. Their entire team is incredibly smart — we’re talking about people who are experts in both medicine and tech. Their CEO, for example, is an MD and a pioneer in AI.

We love working with people who try to solve problems from the inside. People who have personally or professionally felt the limitations of an industry because those people come at these big problems from a Trojan Horse angle. They know all of the flaws and inconsistencies to take down the behemoth.

Anterior is a tech company that provides generative AI solutions for payer organizations — which is a fancy term for healthcare insurance. Have you ever heard of a bigger behemoth than healthcare insurance?

One of their first goals is to help nurses get through insurance approvals much faster and more accurately than ever before. Which, in turn, helps regular people like you or me get the care we need much quicker.

Okay, so that’s the background. Now let’s get into the brand.

A trusted brand built for the future.

Cue a midjourney image of a doctor’s hand shaking the hand of a robot.

The brief was to build a brand that felt trustworthy, classic, and reliable (let’s not forget, their audience is the healthcare industry, which is basically allergic to anything new). But they also wanted the brand to feel exciting, unexpected, and futuristic (they are an AI company after all).

Let’s start with the A symbol:

It’s crafted to feel powerful, yet agile, with unexpected angles at every turn. It’s designed to feel timeless rather than trendy, with both a sense of movement, and subtle curves to give the overall mark a deep, lasting sense of balance.

We wanted to create something that had weight but also conveyed an inherent sense of flexibility. This stenciled A shape has a tactile feeling to it, like something you’d see on the side of a shipping container or an MRI machine. We played with the contrasts of the mark as well to really give it a sense of variability. That helped us lean into the future-y vibe a bit more. Lastly, we rounded the edges to bring an overall friendliness to the shape. It’s strong but it’s dynamic. Like a gym rat that loves Rupi Kaur.

Finding type that feels juuuuust right.

Once the symbol started to take shape we started trying to pair it with some type that felt really responsible, while also nodding to the construction of the symbol itself. We landed on Planar by Grilli Type which felt truly perfect. It’s lower case A matched the vibe of the brand symbol beautifully.

The full wordmark has some great geometry to it, with these hard angled t’s and r’s that give it a nice structured feeling. It creates a future-oriented mindset, instead of leaning too classically modernist/Swiss. But then it evens that out with all of the other letterforms not feeling too over the top or exaggerated. A perfect balance.

I will say Planar does get extreeeeemly wacky with its italics that go up to 45º in both directions which is….unique. So if you’re looking for something that conveys speed look no further.

Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaans.

With a wordmark and symbol that had a ton of hard edged geometry to them, we knew we wanted the brand type to feel a bit more traditional and clean. This is the healthcare industry after all, so we needed to make sure this brand had some trust and structure built into the foundation.

We were working with a couple of options and then immediately fell in love with Saans from Displaay. If anyone asks you for a perfectly balanced modernist typeface just send them Saans. It’s the perfect nothing typeface in every way.

Go girl give us nothing!

Health tech…on acid.

Any time we sit down and create a brand, one of our core deliverables is brand assets. They vary from client to client but the goal is to give them something to use that makes them feel unique and “branded” out in the real world. The further we get into AI products the harder it gets to make a search bar look cool. At the end of the day we’re just making fancy input fields. Which are notoriously not the most engaging parts of a product.

What if, hear me out, we didn’t do any of that?

For this project we wanted to have nothing to do with text inputs or cursors. So we thought about who this audience actually is. It’s nurses looking at paperwork from doctors and medical reports.

Hmmm paperwork and cubicles also notttttttt the most inspiring content to work with. BUT then we actually dug in a bit deeper and said, what if we used some of these things they are looking at on a daily basis? X-Rays! MRI scans!! What ifffffff we dove down into the molecular level and showed what cells look like when they are under a microscope!!!!!

There was a TON to play with there, so we pushed those concepts to the limit by introducing acid-like colors and motion blurs that would catch anyones eye at a trade show or in a stack of business cards.

It’s funny with AI brands now people ask us how much AI we use in our workflow and the answer is none. I’m an old fashioned Photoshop action guy. It’s my secret weapon. I was on Creative Market just looking though the actions section when I saw Acid Motion by Pixelbuddah and was like THAT’S IT. You can see above where we turned a regular looking rendering from Unsplash into something really engaging and CoNcEpTuAl.

The possibilities with this technique are endless. And honestly very fun to make. I did have to watch a tutorial on YouTube quite a few times before I got it to work just right, but that just comes with the territory of learning new Photoshop actions. Thank you YouTube University.

We ended up creating a folder full of these to hand off to the client to use for social posts, blog headers, business cards, postcards, etc. You can slap one of these puppies anywhere and you’re ready to ride.

A brief aside — what is pre-authorization? In case you actually care.

Chara has a background in healthcare marketing — so she understands the complexities of the healthcare landscape. And boy are there a lot of rules about what you can and cannot do in healthcare marketing.

What Anterior actually does probably isn’t relevant to most of our readers — you all tend to be more interested in design and branding than the nuances of healthcare administration — but in case you’re wondering, Anterior’s initial offering specifically focuses on pre-authorization. I’ll now provide a quick overview as to what that is, and how it could change…but if you’re not interested, seriously just skip down to the next heading, and we’ll talk about the design vibes there, I swear.

What they actually do is expedite the process of pre-authorization.

You know, if your doctor has ever told you, “Oh you need an MRI — but first we need to see if your insurance will cover it?” That’s what we’re talking about. Right now, that “pre-authorization” process, typically takes a few days — your case file gets sent off to a nurse, who compares your doctor’s request with various clinical criteria, then says, “Yep! Looks like this one is gonna need an MRI.” Bam. Pre-authorized.

But what if instead of leaving the doctor’s office, waiting a few days, then calling back to schedule the MRI….the pre-authorization process was more like swiping a credit card at a grocery store. Your doctor hits the submit button, then waits a few moments, and he says, ok great, your pre-authorization went through — and you can schedule that MRI on the spot. And you and your doctor can decide together whether it’s urgent (let me squeeze you in tomorrow) or if it can wait until a more convenient time next week.

That’s the first project Anterior is tackling, but their overall goal is to improve healthcare in general, with a whole suite of powerful AI tools for doctors and nurses.

Introducing Florence AI.

Anterior doesn’t have AI in their name, but AI is embedded into everything they do. In the approachable-first-name-style of so many other virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa, Claude, etc.), they’ve cleverly named their AI Florence, based off of the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. We created a sub-brand for Florence using an ever so slightly customized version of the inner park of the A symbol. Then, we tilted it upward to represent the famous flame of Florence’s candle. It really came together quite poetically.

The complexities of content.

Like we mentioned above. Marketing and branding in the healthcare realm can be a bit tricky. You have to be very intentional about what is tied back to your parent brand.

When the folks at Anterior came to us they knew that not only did they want to build a product that can change the industry, but they also wanted to engage healthcare professionals via podcasts and keynotes. They didn’t want to shy away from the hard questions about AI in the healthcare industry. In fact, they wanted to talk about them open and honestly.

The tricky thing is, a lot of the time you legally can’t go and say “This message is brought to you by Anterior, you should buy our product.” It’s just a little bit of a conflict of interest.

We had to develop what’s called an unbranded angle for their public podcast. It still ladders up to the parent brand but we don’t put the logo or name anywhere near it.

We developed a system for the art that uses acid motion photos in the header and then has a simple folder shape that holds all the relevant episode information written in Saans. Remember the paperwork stuff we were talking about earlier? This folder element was another subtle nod to that.

We even took that folder motif and made it a brand element that they could play with on their marketing materials.

This brand was a fun one to create. The Anterior folks just got it. Working with a founding designer is an absolute dream for our team because we know the brand is in good hands without a ton of oversight. They have taken all of the brand elements we’ve given them and rolled it out all on their own. They even just launched this beautiful new site designed in house → anterior.com.

One response to our initial presentation that I’ll never forget as long as I live was, “As you all were presenting this I just kept thinking wow! I want to work for that company. And then I was like, wait! I already do.”

We know Anterior is going to do some great things, especially coming on the heels of the $20 million fundraising round that was just announced in Business Insider. So keep an eye on what they’re up to next.

Did you like this project? Do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks. Even if we can’t work with you for some reason, we’ll try to intro you to someone who can! Networking!

Symbol & Brand Design: Summer McClure
Typography & Style Guide: Dayan D’Aniello
Brand Design & Creative Direction: Mike Smith
Copywriting: Chara Smith

Branding Anterior was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bringing the behind-the-scenes weirdos to center stage.

Well well well, if it isn’t another Smith & Diction brand with some weirdo mascot type thing. We squeeeeezed this project in as a sprint right at the end of last year and boy did we have some fun.

We got an email from Jessica Strelioff at Goodside Studio intro’ing us to Preston Richardson at 41 West because they were booked up and luckily we were just winding down on a big project so we said, why not end the year with a fun little sprint?

During our initial chat with Preston, he was talking about how wonderful it is to be on set and see all kinds of various people from all kinds of different backgrounds working together for one common goal. T̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶, I meannnnn to make commercial “art.”

41 West is a motion and stills production studio. They are the people who herd the wild people into making beautiful art. They’ve been doing this for quite a while too. Preston and his team have worked with clients like, Paypal, Athleta, Allbirds, North Face, Columbia, Oros Apparel and many more. Preston had been doing it under his own name for a few years and decided to launch a new brand to make it feel a little bigger than just a one man show.

He called it 41 West after the road in California that leads from the ocean to the mountains. So poetic. So he hit us up to make something that felt funky and fun while also being able to hold up in corporate Google Slides presentations. I mean that’s kinda what everyone hits us up for these days. Hey, make it weird…but digestible.

Smith & Diction making weird yet digestible brands for the corporate atmosphere™©®

Anyway, can you tell I don’t have much to say here other than that we just truly had a bunch of fun? I think sometimes it’s okay if design does that. Like, it’s okay if something just makes your heart feel happy.

The wordmark is a somewhat customized version of Youth — Black by All Caps. It has an amazing power to transport you back to some bygone television era of 1960’s news intros while also not being over the top goofy.

We developed a visual language that was built to flex. Literally. Summer created this W that can stretch across wide spaces or bend around corners to let the brand be more than just a static wordmark. It adds a bit of levity and play that I think most production studios are afraid to put out there.

Like I mentioned above, when we talked to Preston about his visions for the brand, we kept coming back to this idea of the groups of people that come together to make big productions happen. Stylists, gaffers, sound engineers, people who blow things up, photographers, directors, hair and make up, etc. And most of the time those people are such beautifully unique individuals (that’s the woke way of saying weirdos). We wanted this brand to pay some homage to the team. What if we made them the central figures? So Summer drew up a fun cast of characters that have a ton of personality, even though they are kinda just thumb shaped blobs with no mouths.

Once we drew them up we knew that they must be animated and that there was only one person we trusted to do it right: James Dybvig. He was the perfect partner to give these figures the right amount of quirky spunk. He did an absolutely amazing job with this camera guy.

Sprints are always risky but this one totally paid off.

Working with Preston was great. He was the first person we opened the Sprint offering up to that wasn’t a direct homie of ours. And he totally got it. He understood the time constraints and helped keep things moving quickly. But he also trusted us to really do our thing. And that allowed us to create something together that feels unique for the space and also has a bit of his personality baked into it.

It’s nice to know that the business model can work and still be a ton of fun.

Credits:
Summer McClure — Brand & Illustration
James Dybvig — Animation

Did you like this project? Want to work with us and make some funky stuff together? Let’s do it.

Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks. Even if we can’t work with you for some reason, we’ll try to intro you to someone who can! Networking!

Branding 41 West was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Smith & Diction Identity Process

One year ago, we published The Process on Figma. We put it together to give prospective clients an overview of who we are and how we work. Simply put, we realized that a lot of our initial conversations were spent going over basic info that didn’t necessarily need to be shared during a 1:1 conversation. We could make the precious initial client moments more productive by giving folks a little more information up front. Plus, by writing our process down, it lets us to share our thoughts more coherently and visually than we ever could in a 30-minute Zoom conversation.

But over the past year, we realized that unless we directly shared our process with someone, it was fairly hard for them to find. If you search online for “Smith & Diction Process” the Figma file won’t come up, instead you have to stroll on over to my silly little xeeter profile, which is fun for no one. So we figured we’d repost the guts of the Process here (with all the lovely built-in SEO optimization, thank you Medium), with a few new insights and examples thrown in. Hopefully this new edition will make this info even easier to find.

Before we get into the details, have to start like we did in our original document: we know there’s more than one way to build a brand. There’s no secret sauce or special workshop question that unlocks an extraordinary identity. All kinds of folks do it all kinds of different ways — and that’s awesome.

We’ve challenged our own process a lot over the past year, which actually led to us launching a whole new way of working that’s quite different from the typical Process you’ll read about here (see: The Sprint). But whether the process is relatively new or tried-and-true, we still believe that having a process — a framework for creative exploration — is important. So this is ours.

Step 1. Introductions

Our process is all about real conversations between human beings. Working with us means a lot of casual — but important — discussions, complete with honest opinions, unhindered excitement, and creativity that’s only possible when you wholeheartedly trust your partners, because you know they truly have the best interest of your brand at heart. Picking partners can be a delicate process, but for us it all pretty much boils down to the issue of trust. We pick partners whose vision we believe in, and in turn, we ask them to trust that we’ll treat their brand like it’s our own.

Before we ever take on a new project, we start things off with a quick chat. Just a chance to get to know each other and really understand your project scope and goals. This is where you do a lot of talking, we do a lot of listening, and we discuss just about everything.

We usually ask questions like:

How did you find us?

What do we need to know about your company?

Why is this a good time to focus on your brand?

Where are you hoping this new brand will lead?

Step 2. Proposal

Once we understand the gist of what you’re looking for, we’ll estimate out a project budget and timeline for you to review. This is where you can get a clear picture of the road ahead. This is also where you can choose to add or remove things from the scope to meet your needs and budget.

Our proposal will include things like:

Outlined project scope

Projected timeline

Estimated costs

This stage often includes a little back and forth — you say, oh, can we also get a pitch deck template? Or maybe we adjust the timing to align with your next round of fundraising.

Step 3. Contract & Deposit

Once our project gets the green light, we’ll sign a contract and collect a deposit. Typically, we ask for 50% of the project fee up front. That ensures both parties are equally invested in the project right from the outset. The remaining payments will be spread out over the course of our work together.

Before work begins, we’ll finalize the paperwork:

Contract for a digital signature

Detailed scope of work

Initial invoice

Step 4. Discovery

We kick every project off with a candid, casual get-to-know-you process. We don’t usually spend much time on those “if you were a car, what kind of car would you be” gimmicks. Instead, our goal is simply to hear from each key stakeholder, working to understand as much as we can about your company, your work, your brand, your passions, your individual perspective, and all your various needs, likes, dislikes, goals, and expectations for our work together.

In our discovery conversation, we’ll ask questions like:

Who are your main competitors?

Who is your target audience?

What feelings do you want your brand to convey?

What are your goals for this branding effort?

What other brands or companies do you admire?

Why is now the right time for this work?

Step 5. Moodboards

Our process is built on trust — but it’s also a pretty collaborative approach. We always want a branding effort to feel like we’re all partners, working together. So before we launch full-steam into creative work, we always do a gut check to make sure we’re on the same page visually.

When I say, “luxury” and you say “luxury”, we might be thinking of two very different things. That’s why we put together Moodboards — visual inspiration that we’ll share with you to make sure we’re all on the same page about what “luxury” looks like. We’ll talk about what vibe feels right for your brand, and use your choices as an ongoing reference throughout our creative process.

This step is one of our favorite moments in brand creation, because it’s all about possibility. We share all the ideas we’re excited about, while you get to share all your most honest opinions before we invest time and energy into making actual creative work. This conversation is pure potential, and it’s always an exciting moment when we get to sit down and create a vision for where your brand can go.

What do Moodboards look like? Here are a few we’ve put together recently:

Step 6. Identity Design

After Moodboard approval, design work begins. An initial brand identity usually takes about four weeks, but it varies depending on project scope, schedules, etc. This is the only “black box” period of our process, where you get a little break, while we work with our heads down : insert kermit typing furiously GIF :

If you don’t hear from us for a few weeks in here, don’t worry! That just means we’re hard at work turning ideas into designs.

A few logos we’ve made:

Step 7. Brandwork

We work hard to make sure the identities we build have both strength and flexibility. To that goal, before we share anything with you, we put each new brand option to work. We’ll do that by designing out a few relevant sample executions that show how all the elements of a new identity — logo, colors, typography, design elements, copy tone, etc. — work together. We call this brandwork, because it’s designed to show your brand at work.

Brandwork is important because it allows you to understand how your type and colors and logo feel in various different contexts. But Brandwork isn’t the same thing as final, production-ready files. If we put together a sample event invitation, it might not be for a real event. If we mock up a website landing page, it may not have all the right content and CTAs. The details are just there to help things feel real, so that you can understand how all the brand elements work together. Because that will help you decide which direction you want to go.

Examples of Brandwork may include:

Print collateral—stationery, brochures, mailers, etc.

Digital collateral—like avatars, social media ads, emails, presentation decks, etc.

Packaging

Signage—wheatpastes, wayfinding, neon, etc.

Merch—tees, totes, hats, cups, keychains, etc.

A website landing page

Step 8. Presentation

A typical S&D branding project includes 2–3 identity directions. Rather than aiming for quantity, we go for depth, working to make sure each option will truly be able to meet your brand needs.

We’ll present logos, identity elements, and brandwork all together — and ideally, we’ll share it with all your key stakeholders at once. That way we can gather everyone’s initial thoughts and gut reactions, but we’ll also send you a PDF to mull over afterward as well.

Step 9. Feedback & Revisions

A standard project scope includes two rounds of revisions. That means you’ll see designs, provide feedback, see updated designs, provide more feedback, then see final designs for approval. If you need additional revisions, we can either build them into the scope from the start, or we’ll charge an overage fee — that approach helps keep feedback clear and concise, which saves everyone time and energy all around.

As you’re reviewing the options, of course you’ll want to trust your gut. But we also recommend these best practices as well:

Live with it — set your logo as your lock screen & see how it feels each time you tap your phone

Know your audience — remember that what works best may not be what you like best

Gather the stakeholders — let all your key decision-makers weigh in on the options before any revisions begin

Step 10. Brand Rollout

Once we have brand approval, it’s time to share it with the world. For a typical identity project, we’ll deliver all kinds of logo files, any key design assets we created during the branding process (patterns, illustrations, design elements, etc.), and a style guide. Often, this is also when we start kicking off additional design projects — like a website, branded merch, a presentation deck, print materials, and digital templates.

A brand rollout package usually includes:

Logo in all the file types you’ll need—ai, png, svg, jpg, etc.

Any design assets we’ve created—patterns, icons, etc.

An Illustrator Cheat Sheet—with all the things listed above in one easy-to-find document

Social media avatars

Links to purchase fonts

Brand style guide — either as a PDF, a working Figma file, or an online style guide built on Standards

Often, a brand rollout will also include a few other things, beyond the scope of an identity: brand stationery, social templates, a website, etc. While our Brand Identity process is fairly well tested, our Brand Rollout process is much more tailored to each and every client. We can scope out a few additional executions as part of your identity package, we can dive into them after identity is approved, or we can kick off an ongoing relationship (which we call Brand Reinforcement) to work as your on-call CCO/design team after launch. Totally up to you.

Conclusion: Trust Your Partners

That’s the full Smith & Diction branding process. Nothing else to it. There’s just one other thing we didn’t mention yet: this process can be a lot of fun.

One of the best side effects of choosing partners you like and trust is that over time, we get to know one another. Often, after a few deeply collaborative conversations where we anaylze the nuanced differences of typefaces and pull up more design references than any of us thought possible, our clients begin feeling less like clients, and more like friends.

So if…a few months in…if find yourself in a Slack channel that’s supposed to be brainstorming ideas for your latest merch drop, but that’s seemingly more focused on sharing relevant jokes and memes, well…we’d like to say that’s unusual, but actually, it’s one of our favorite things about this business: the people we get to make stuff with.

Think you’re ready to trust the process?
Talk to us → hello@smith-diction.com

Trust the Process was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The year 2023 sounds like the beginning of every apocalyptic sci-fi movie. And while this year deff had the vibes of an apocalyptic sci-fi movie in every way possible, we all kept on going on despite the strange eerie darkness.

At the studio, we did our very best to focus our energy on the bright spots. To keep on having fun at work and pushing ourselves to make interesting new things for people we enjoy working with. This year we completed 15 brand identity projects, designed a stressful mural, and wrote down our process, which took off like a rocket. We tried to grow the team and failed, shared our idea of what a brand sprint should be, won an award, did some public speaking, worked on some very big NDA stuff, Chara got on the cover of her alumni magazine, Dayan got a new cat, and I only had one minor panic attack while getting off of Lexapro.

Anyway, this post will be a bit different than our normal case studies because most of the work we did this year didn’t really fit into the typical “S&D case study” format. But we still wanted to share it. So this is just a fun way to show some of our favorite work from the year.

Simplifying Perplexity

First up is Perplexity. This work was far and away the most liked, engaged with, and shared thing that we worked on this year. It was a fun one because every person from the team chipped in and helped, so it really felt like we all owned a little slice of it. Working with Henry Modisett & Phi Hoang from Perplexity was a literal dream. I truly felt like they became our best buds in the process. And the way they’ve taken the brand and run with it is something that should be studied in brand hand-off history.

Our goal was to create an AI brand that felt more like a Scandanivain subway system and less like the representation of a fuzzy false future with blurry gradients and happy faced characters everywhere. They wanted something serious and dependable. We were incredibly lucky to work with Justin Lawes and Upright T-Rex to bring the mark to life through animation and sound.

We’re so proud of this identity and we were thrilled when it got a kind write up on Brand New. The comment section wasn’t toooooo bad, just some people hating on my writing style. To them I say, deal with it 😎.

The one and only Ginger Rudolph

This next one was a bit of a sleeper project because it was a sprint that didn’t have a ton of executions tied to it. Ginger is a friend of the studio, she works directly with the Paradigm folks and is a board member at the Rail Park. She came to us looking to step up her personal brand/business card game. She is a force. When she enters a room, you are immediately drawn to her energy, so we wanted to make a brand that lived up to her powerful and unique aura.

Quail Store — Not for birds

Next up: Quail Store, a project that really let Dayan shine. Ashley from Quail Store came to us looking to brand her store here in Philly, but she wasn’t entirely sure what exactly would be in that store. We knew it would be a mix of antiques, ceramics, and modern design curiosities though, so we kinda channeled that eclectic energy and created a brand that could sort of reach across that entire spectrum in a clean and considered way.

Dayan absolutely crushed it on this one, delivering a whole range of logo options—including an elegant script logo, a fancy Parisian looking sans logo, and a QS monogram that will melt your heart.

Philly Mural — A love letter to the Parkway

Now for that mural I mentioned earlier. I’ve been doing my best to not let work get to my head and drive me crazy these days, but this project really drove me to the brink because I knew that if it sucked I’d be banned from Philly. Especially since I talk so much trash on people that hire studios from outside of Philly to work on Philly things. I had to walk the walk with this one.

The Philadelphia Visitor Center asked us to come up with the name and some exterior graphics for their new mini visitor center at the bottom of the Art Museum Steps right next to the Rocky Statue. We came up with the name Parkway Outpost so if they decided to do more of these pop-ups around the city they could just put the location + outpost and it could operate as a pretty flexible system. For example: Fishtown Outpost, South Street Outpost, Rittenhouse Outpost, Penns Landing Outpost, etc. It works with the location OR the landmark.

Not going to lie, when I started S&D I was like, “I want to make Philly more than just Rocky, 1776, cheesesteaks, and disappointing sports teams! I’ll never put Rocky on anything! I swear!” Eight years later and my job was to literally put Rocky on a thing. So I took it with great responsibility. I even had a talk with my therapist about it. I was feeling the pressure in a big way.

I wanted to create something that got people excited and didn’t use the typical Philly tropes. We had our hands tied with photo usage and whatnot, so I just used all of my own photos that I had taken over the years as I walked up and down the Parkway. This mural was a love letter to those walks and my city.

I ride past this thing on my typical bike loop and I’d say 9 times out of 10 there’s someone taking their photo in front of it. It really warms my heart and makes me feel proud that people actually dig this design.

We also made a map that showcased all of the great things to do and see on the Parkway as well. So many people visit these steps every single day and it felt like such a missed opportunity to sort of leave them empty handed. The Visitor Center folks wanted to take charge and let those people know that there is so much to do all within walking distance of the museum steps. We were happy to be a tiny part in helping people realize that Philly is the most incredible city in the world.

We designed a ton of things for the interior of the shop, too, but MGM and Sly’s team killed all of it. We hired Malachy Eagan to make this unbelievable illustration of the Rocky championship belt. But technically we didn’t have the rights to use the other characters likenesses, so it got killed. I was sad to see all of this stuff get passed over, but I guess that’s just how it goes when you’re working with two legal teams. Hard to get much through so I’m just glad our mural got approved untouched.

Sidenote, here’s a picture of Sylvester Stallone holding a logo we made.

Velocette — A ~lovely~ brand

When we work on a sprint, the whole studio will usually take a spin at a direction. But sometimes one person will just feel inspired and come out of the gate with two or three directions all on their own. That was the case with Summer on the branding for interior design studio, Velocette. She showed up to our first meeting with one direction of interchangeable wordmarks AND another another direction that was sort of based on hand drawn blueprints. So the res of us just stepped back and let her do her own thing. The multi-wordmark direction really tapped into the Velocette Studio approach to design, which is super flexible, adjusting the aesthetic to fit each project.

During this project, we also had one of those moments when a client mentions something during discovery and we all nod and smile and think, “There’s no way that one’s gonna happen they way they want.” But somehow this one actually did. Hope Velocette said something along the lines of “I love that our name has all the letters of LOVE in it…if there’s a way to bring that out, that’d be so great,” and while messing around with these different wordmark lockups, Summer came up with this incredible unexpected pattern where the word Love is just as easy to see as the stacked name Velocette.

Living Roots — Telling a story with symbols

Now for some work that’s slowly rolling out over the next year or so. We’ll write an officially official case study about it when we can, but since this was a bucket list project of mine and I absolutely can not shut up about it, I’ll post a preview of the work here for now.

Living Roots is a winery in both the Finger Lakes of New York and the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. Most wineries in the Finger Lakes specialize in really nice whites because that’s the kind of grapes that thrive best there. So it leaves the reds with a bit to be desired. But since Living Roots also has a vineyard in South Australia, they have a unique situation where they can offer the light whites and the deep reds.

We knew we needed to tell this multi-continent story within the identity itself because that’s what makes Living Roots so special. So we developed a logo that consisted of multiple icons that tell a collective story, instead of a single symbol. Those icons can be split apart, stacked in an oval, used independently, or rearranged in many different ways depending on what the client and execution needs. Saving out all of the files was a bit of a task but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

We had so much fun while developing this brand. We used the symbols from the logo as background elements on the bottles to drive home their meaning and importance. We also got to work with Jeffery Phillips, an Aussie illustrator, to create this sneaky mascot who’s just trying to drink in peace. Let him be!

I can’t wait to show off much much more when it all starts to come together. Keep an eye out mid-2024.

Writing it all down.

This was the first year we started to write down things OTHER than our case studies. I love writing and I have the best editor in the world so why not do it more? We’re called Smith & Diction for a reason. Here’s some of the stuff we published.

Trusting and giving away the Process

In January of 2023 we published our process document in Figma and it absolutely went wild. We thought there was nothing revolutionary in the document. Just an overview of what it’s like to work on a project with Smith & Diction. I had no intention of it blowing up. But it really took off, and it actually brought in about 60% of our new business for the year which I was endlessly grateful for but could not have anticipated.

It went so wild that it actually crashed my Figma because there were too many people in the document at one time. It was a really nice reminder that sharing is always better than hoarding. If we could help one person develop a better understanding of their own process for their business then it would be a great success. Some kids even shouted me out on TikTok, good for them.

I can’t tell you how many people were hitting me up being like, “Yoooo my boss just shared your doc on the work Slack.” We were so grateful to have so many wonderful conversations because of this simple document and hope to share much more like it in the future.

We’ve even been tossing around the idea of writing a book! Chara and I have been workshopping the best topics to cover and we’ll have more on that next year. We’re still in the very very early stages but we’re thinking it will be more like a design 101 for founders and people starting businesses.

We want to ease the communication process between founders who may not have ever worked with an agency or studio before and the design studios they work with. We want help decipher the jargon on both sides to make sure people get the work they want and communicate more clearly.

If you have any ideas, tips, stories, or topics you think we should include us drop us a line → chara@smith-diction.com. And we’ll prob be looking for people to proofread and help edit the first draft whenever that happens.

The Sprint

This year we also released our thoughts on the Sprint offering. We had been silently offering this super quick branding option to friends of the studio since 2020, honing it and seeing what worked and what didn’t. After three-ish years of quietly testing it, this year we were finally ready to release it into the wild and stand by it with a strict set of rules. After publishing this article we got a bunch of inquiries and our defined list of rules absolutely guided us through what would work for us or not. Sometimes it’s nice to draw a line in the sand and set a clear boundary around a sort of blobby idea.

We worked on a bunch of really fun sprints after we published the post. Here are a few fun ones (including some that haven’t been made public yet). We were also hyped on a little wordmark redraw we did for the Yodeler Hotel out in Montana.

Just last week we finished our final sprint of the year for 41 West, a production studio out in California (coming soon). Summer had a ton of fun with this one. In the kickoff, we were talking about all the fantastic characters that you find on video shoots, so in addition to the flexible, fun wordmark, she also illustrated a whole weird little production crew to put on merch and whatnot.

Good news and good vibes

And now, a quick list of some press we got this year.

Best of Philly

I’m usually not concerned with awards or anything like that, it’s not why we do what we do. But when we got named Best of Philly this year, I felt a very weird sense of pride. It was an honor to feel recognized in the city we love so much. Thank you to Regan Stephens who worked her magic on making this a reality.

Smith & Diction

It’s Nice That

We chatted with our good friend Elizabeth Goodspeed about the state of branding for an article in It’s Nice That.

Are rebrands starting to look the same? The challenges defining commercial design

Brand New

Our logo for Perplexity came in at #5 best icon on Brand New’s end of year recap

2022 Year in Review - A 10-part Series

The Brand Identity

The Brand Identity interviewed us about what makes our studio tick. It’s all about making work that makes your heart sing. You can feel when you’re on to something and that’s our secret sauce. We don’t stop until we feel it.

The Brand Identity

We also chatted with them about how our small studio handles project management.

The Brand Identity

The Process Chat at the W Hotel

We had a fun night with Nick Vicente & Rahmi Halaby talking about the process of how we approach design and life. A whole BUNCH of people came out and I had such a great time catching up with old friends and making some new ones. It was so awesome to just connect with all kinds of Philly designers and makers. I’d deff love to do more of these kind of round table chats in 2024.

Launching our online shop

Every year Chara and I sit down and try to think deeply about what we want to be working on at the studio. Last year I said I wanted to carve out a bit more time to make things that only had one purpose: to make me happy. I grew up in the poster era of design. I studied folks like Jason Munn, The Heads of State, Aesthetic Apparatus, Large Mammal, Invisible Creature, etc. I LOVE making posters. So this year I made it a priority to make some for the first time in a long time.

We’re lucky because the building our studio is in hosts two annual Open Studios events where thousands of people come and see what everything is all about. It’s a perfect venue to sell posters and talk about design. Now I set those events as my goal posts to put together a new poster or two.

People started asking me if I had a place they could buy them online and I was like ahhhh that’s such a hassle, I’m not going to deal with shipping and taxes and blah blah blah. But then I looked into Big Cartel and was like oh! This isn’t so bad. So I set up an online shop in less than 24 hours.

It’s even inspired me to make even more things and think outside of the poster format. One night as I was falling asleep I was randomly thinking about the NASA logo, as one does, and I was like wow the worm is a perfect name for that thing. Then I was like, I wonder what it looks like when you write WORM in the NASA typeface? Would that be dumb? The answer is yes it’s dumb but it’s also so so good. So I put it on a hat and sold 40 of them. They are all sold out at the moment but I dunno maybe we’ll do a blue run in the future??

I’m not trying to make a living off of this shop, it just makes me really happy to get into the weeds a little and put my heart out there just a bit. Most of my posters have been a take on dealing with my emotions and anxiety, so it’s nice to just have an avenue where the stakes are so low and if other people relate to them then hell yeah man, that’s great.

Thanks for reading or scrolling this far. I know these things always get a bit longwinded, but that’s just how this stuff goes for me. I feel like designers are always trying to simplify, to make things faster, to optimize everything. But honestly, sometimes it’s great to be a human and just kind of wander through thoughts and ideas for awhile. Thanks for coming with me while I wandered through 2023, cheers to more weird wanderings in 2024. I’ve already got some more merch ideas.

2023 S&D Greatest Hits was originally published in Smith & Diction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.