

Logos from the past few years.
GDC09 Awards Program
Game Developers Conference 2008 overall style, guidelines, advertising, signage, and collateral.
Game Developers Conference 2007 overall style, guidelines, advertising, signage, and collateral.
Game Developers Conference 2007 style explorations based upon the theme "Take Control."
Set of three career guides for all IDEO employees. One overview booklet, one for Support roles and another for Design. A system of charts and icons were developed to live beyond the books and integrate into other properties.
Creative direction and graphic design for IDEO and their clients over the past six+ years.
Logo, identity guidelines, website, UI, and iconography.
Site architecture and UX by Nancy
Broden – highly recommended.
Yahoo! browser user interface.
Yahoo! Photos icons.
Logo, identity, websites, advertising, print collateral, album covers, and illustrations.
Volume 3 CD, booklet, and photogrpahy.
Various illustrations and photos.
Recent posters


A kick-off meeting with key stakeholders to jointly fill out a creative brief. This provides background, project details, and consensus while building trust and a shared vocabulary between client and designer.

Identifying brand keywords, audience profiles, competitors' brand attributes, and general style categories.

Cycling the company's name through thousands of typefaces (looking for stylistic fits and interesting letterforms), customizing found type, and creating new letterforms.

Logomarks are explored for shape, concept, style, and typographic pairing. Designs that combine the best aesthetics and concepts are pulled for presentation. The range of chosen directions will tell a story from conservative to unexpected.

A PDF presentation is created that describes the project's overview through research, highlights target audience profiles, shows a competitive logo space, highlights 3-7 directions from the explorations, shows rough color applied to each, potential audience reactions to each direction, overall concept to each design, pros & cons, potential real-world applications for reference, and all the sketches explored in creating the highlighted designs. Presentations can be in-person with hard copies or through email. Clients are always provided with their own copy of the presentation to gather their own feedback.

Recombination of different logo directions from the presentation round, refinement of specific elements and further explorations of new ideas. This stage may happen one to two times until a final design is agreed to.

Final deliverables include various vector and raster files of the full logo, type, marks and support elements. A style guide is sometimes added to stipulate colors and the usage of support items.

In a world of trendy designers, Lindsay Gravette stands out as an experienced professional, a straight shooter and a conceptual thinker. Lindsay’s clients don’t hire him just to “build a website” or “create a corporate identity.” They’re looking for ideas, for smart, conceptual thinking that can only come from years of experience with clients ranging from local brands to Fortune 100 companies. They’re looking for design with palpable depth. The kind that tells a story on a visceral level. The kind of design that solves creative problems and makes the soul of a brand sing. Change is a constant in the design world, but there are some designers, like Lindsay, who have the depth of knowledge to provide one constant: thorough and thoughtful reasoning that leads to truly delightful design. |
elbow ⁄ lindsay gravette |
Some clients include |
Not at this time. It's pretty much just a one-man band thing right now.
If you're a freelance illustrator, photographer, designer, developer or a small, local firm, I'd love to hear from you. I work with various people on projects as they come along.
I've always worked under different pseudonyms (see Theory of Obscurity), but started using elbow in 1996 after my annual Singing Detective viewing: "What's the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page, hmm? Whadja think? ... Well now, I'll tell you: E, L, B, O, W, 'elbow'."