Design Doyenne: Branding Beyond Design

Dear Pamela,
After my excursion to the wilds of Salem, Oregon for my last missive, I traveled up the road to Hornall Anderson Design Works in Seattle. This large design firm of approximately 90 people has managed to thrive and whet its creative edge for almost two decades. Take this as a metaphor for HADW’s success: Each time I journey to its Western Avenue headquarters another floor of the building has been appropriated for its offices. After all, the company’s somehow got to accommodate its expanding Online Media department, which has doubled in size to 30 people in just two years.

HADW’s strategy for staying at the top of its game is not just to change the game plan, but also to devise a whole new game. When the design firm commits to invent or reinvent a company, HADW’s involvement always moves beyond design per se. Imagine this: Each client has a design team attached to it, and each team is committed to 24/7-involvement with the client, starting with intense scrutiny of the business itself and how it should be positioned. After analyzing a client’s business plan, HADW then captures the company’s ideas, aspirations, and strategy — its raison d’etre — of each project. They use this material to convey the client’s story through a comprehensive identity program and extend it to an integrated range of applications. HADW hones in on not just the image, not just identity and its visual manifestation, but on how to capture this client’s perspective in a consistent graphic way. The HADW teams do not just respond to what the client defines as its needs today, but they collaborate in projecting the client’s future growth as well.

The end result is a fluid, adaptable style that takes each client’s needs into consideration. That’s how they can accommodate clients from the lesser known like Twelve Horses to giants like Weyerhaeuser.

HADW develops brands for a variety of clients, including small companies like Twelve Horses.

Look at the HADW Web site where this design firm tells its own story and demonstrates how it captures a personal style with focused content. The site reflects the HADW culture — energetic, synergistic, client-friendly, experimental, and experiential. But it’s also lyrical and promotional, evoking a personal hands-on involvement with clients while touting its client base both in links and case studies. There are familiar HADW designs here, like Leatherman, Starbucks, Novell and K2 Skis. The A-to-Z client list ranges from mega-corporations to start-ups.

For pocket-tool maker Leatherman, one of its many high-profile clients, HADW designed catalog pages for a new product line called Juice, coming in fall 2001.