Creative Brief

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.

Research

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

Type Exploration

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

Mark Exploration

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 surprising.

Presentation

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.

Refinement

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.

Deliverables

Final deliverables include various vector and raster files of the full logo, type, marks and support elements. A standards manual is sometimes added to illustrate the full identity system and aid in successful implementation.

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.

lindsay gravette 1155 Tennessee Street San Francisco, CA 94107 415-738-8833 [email protected] elbow.com +

Some clients include Airbus, Bank of America, Bruno's, Chronicle Books, Cisco, CMP Media, D2M, EFF, Food World, Forest City, The George P. Johnson Company, Home Depot, Hartmann, IDEO, Intuit, Logitech, Microsoft, N.I.C.E. Collective, Oracle, Palladeo, Procter & Gamble, Qik, Sparks, Sun, UBM, VMware, Yahoo!

My time is currently limited for new projects as i serve as Design Director for Duncan/Channon here in San Francisco. Feel free to contact me or D/C if you have a project you would like to work on together.

How long have you been practicing?

Since graduating art school and moving to San Francisco in 1994. Over the past seventeen years, I've worked predominantely for myself under the name elbow (outside of two years in the mid-nineties at a couple of local design firms; long, long ago).

Are you hiring or have any internships?

Not at this time. It's pretty much just a one-man band thing.

Do you work with outside help?

If you're a freelance illustrator, photographer, designer, or developer , say hi.

What's with the name elbow?

"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'." — The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter