Creating impactful brands and businesses
Brand Identity • Websites
Brand Identity • Websites
Whether you're creating from a blank canvas or evolving your existing business, we offer a collaborative and human-centred approach that seeks to harmonize your core values, purpose, and vision with the lives and needs of the people your business exists to serve.
We employ a combination of lean, agile, and design-thinking mindsets and tools that will help us to create together in more adaptive, innovative, and efficient ways (time + budget). Depending on your needs and constraints, we're happy to offer different levels of contribution and fidelity ranging from strategic consulting (planning and supporting the work) to practitioner-based consulting (doing the work).
We invite curiousity, so please feel free to reach out so we can explore what working together could look like!
HIP's mission is to connect people to causes by creating fun and simple ways to practice humanity. They envision a city where it's easy for anyone, regardless of age or circumstance, the opportunity to make a difference.
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Going deeper than table stakes branding and marketing, this challenging (and ultimately rewarding) work is about digging deep into the narratives and assumptions people have created for themselves and/or your business, existing or conceptual.
Our work generally begins with the company's leaders, and the objective to unearth and align to a set of core values - which we define as deeply ingrained principles that will guide all of the company’s actions and serve as its cultural cornerstones.
With core values established, understood, and agreed-to, your business can move to validating, refining, or articulating the business' mission (purpose) and begin to envision the journey you will be asking employees and customers to be a part of.
We love helping companies to think, feel, and talk about what their businesses mean to them, and the people they serve. Using an empathetic approach, we're able to explore and unearth the strengths, values, traits, and even quirks that come together to create an authentic identity - one that people can connect with and trust.
Using engaging tools such as questionnaires or surveys, focus groups, ethographic observation, interviews, or some combination of these, we seek to collect all of the 'dots' before we start to connect them through visual, interactive, or other forms of connection.
Our branding work typically includes the following outcomes and deliverables:
Having a beautiful home for your business on the inter webs, offers your customers and other audiences a place to connect, engage, and develop a relationship with your brand (anytime, anywhere).
Leveraging the brand work we might have helped you with (or that might already exist), we can move into website design and development, which looks like this:
Fun fact: Having played around with our fair share of website platforms and services over the years, we made the decision to create our own platform with the following values in mind:
High-performing businesses build trust and carefully design experiences and services from the inside out. Following a human-centred approach, we work closely with our client teams to research, design, implement and continually evolve aligned customer experiences.
To ensure success, and depending on the company, we work with leaders and key stakeholder teams to ensure the business' fundamental identity - its core values, purpose, and vision - exist clearly and become integrated into every customer experience or service touch point - logo, content (text, imagery, video, etc.), phone, email, website, social media, ads, community engagement, and more.
Respecting where you and your team may be in your journey, we promise to work together to design the right engagement and experience for everyone involved.
We're happy to offer (and recommend) an initial meet and greet to explore what working together might look like. When possible, we offer non-profit fees and during challenging times (like COVID), we can explore other value-exchange structures if they make sense.
We also value transparency, so below is a simplified view of how we've been engaging and working with our clients.
Typical Effort: 2-3 weeks
You and/or your team are in need of consulting, project management, and/or visual design capabilities to help bring your authentic brand to life.
At one end of the spectrum, we can take a light approach and help you create some of the core essentials such as a logo, identity guidelines (fonts, colours, protection, styling, etc.), and materials (e-signature, social media icons, etc.). From there, projects can scale depending on factors such as the number of people involved and/or reviews required, any sub or related brands to consider, and/or photography or custom assets to be created.
We recommend an initial discovery and scoping discussion to get a sense of the current vs. desired futures states, and what closing this gap might look like.
Typical Effort: 2 weeks+
You and/or your team are in need of subject matter expertise, consulting, project management, visual and interaction design, and web development capabilities to help you create a new, engaging, and high-performing website.
At one end of the spectrum, we can keep things light and work with you to create a beautifully designed, low maintenance, managed site - custom design, static site, monthly or less frequent content updates, standard performance analytics. And from there, websites can scale in complexity when it comes to requirements gathering, features, functionality, analytics, integration, and so on.
Like a broken record, we recommend an initial discovery and scoping discussion to get a sense of your current vs. desired futures states, and what closing this gap might look like.
Typical Effort: 1-3 weeks
You and/or your team are in need of subject matter expertise, consulting and/or coaching, project management and/or facilitation to help you create a new business model and/or offering(s).
At one end of the spectrum, we can show up as your trusted advisors and provide direction, input, and/or feedback. At the other end of the spectrum, we can do it all - project set up, planning, research, design, implementation, testing, and continued support (or what you could call iterations, evolution, or scaling). And then there a mix of blended approaches to working together in between those two ends of the spectrum.
Either way, we recommend an initial discovery and scoping discussion to get a sense of your current vs. desired futures states, and what closing this gap might look like.