…By bringing diverse community stakeholders into ideation sessions; identifying informational, relational, and navigational gaps in their website; re-thinking the focuses and flows of their information architecture; establishing a new “911” page to meet the immediate needs of people in crisis; and creating a strategy to visually-balance expressions of gravity and hope throughout.

But those are a lot of words about tactics.

This process also deeply changed the orientation of the website. The KCSARC site was originally much more focused on providing information to donors and the general public, as older “brochure-style” websites often are. (The 24-hour helpline was previously the main interface for survivors themselves.) A deeply-moving moment in this project was when we brought survivors’ voices and feelings to the “requirements” phase, articulating how foregrounding their needs online would serve every other audience, too.

We are so proud of this work, and so thankful for KCSARC’s true partnership in it.

Being a good neighbor is important. When a Fortune 10 company was investing into a large planned physical + social footprint in a PNW city, we were brought in to help characterize the needs and emotional landscape of the host community.

Through our research, we learned that — following recent demographic shifts — the community was experiencing a re-formation of collective identity. Citizens of all backgrounds were feeling a shared grief about their city’s lack of deeper cross-cultural connections.

Participants described the community as offering “two experiences” separated by culture, experiencing little overlap in shared spaces or activities. The community’s introverted interaction norms (including a “high activation energy” for leaving the home) — combined with the scarcity of grassroots, cross-cultural, third-place precedents in the area — deepened the community’s concern about building a common identity at this inflection point.

Bringing these unanticipated insights back to the client sparked important ideation about how the company’s footprint in the community could show sensitivity to this context. This included thinking about how the company’s planned use of its commercial space might shift to meet the community’s emergent need for an explicitly cross-cultural, introvert-friendly third-place. Brand messages are most credible when they’re translated into action; the conversations spurred by our research were an exciting example of how “innovation” and “social good” might be translated from verbal values to lived purpose.

…Resulting in written design values that felt like a joyful exhale once they were complete. Our mini-festo frames the firm’s deeply-considered output conceptually — intelligently speaking to architects while avoiding the stale “architect-ese” that plagues many firms. The messaging speaks in a tone + voice that infuses the firm’s characteristic lightheartedness throughout, too.

This strategic work formed the backbone of the firm’s visual/verbal brand refresh. Later, an invitation to design/lead their staff retreat came after the planned verbal work was completed — which led to further insights and happy hour cheersing… A recent email to this client included an FYI about beverages we left in the fridge for them. The best.

…Because we needed a non-convenience sample for our qualitative research… and many of the participants we needed to learn from didn’t have smartphones. (Luckily, the research insights made it all worthwhile.)

This work is in progress across multiple identity touchpoints, and it represents deep collaboration with leadership, staff, board members, and representatives of communities across the Western US. Excitedly and proudly awaiting its debut!

The previous Washington State Parks logo enjoyed deep brand equity — but it depicted a location that was no longer a state park! And the landscape invoked only “coastal Western Washington” visual references; it didn’t fully celebrate a state that spans both moss-draped rainforests and sublime high-desert vistas.

The brief, at this beginning stage, was direct in what not to do: Depict something that only held relevance for a slice of Washingtonians. But in terms of a “north star” for moving forward, our path was ambiguous: With Washington State Parks offering such visual diversity in landscapes (representatively) and experiences/activities (conceptually), choosing just one idea to elevate in the logo was a little mind-boggling.

Luckily, our client was enthusiastic when we suggested research as a pre-design step. Our statewide research effort received nearly 7,000 unique responses, and many expected themes surfaced (the beauty of Washington’s natural landscape was a frequent motif). But the conversation-changing insight here ended up being the concept of emotional range.

A significant minority of respondents wrote movingly — vividly — about what it feels like to experience big feelings, and big life events, within the natural beauty of their state parks. We read stories about people getting married, saying last goodbyes, seeking healing, and making major life decisions — all in Washington State Parks, all because these special places felt like they offered something essential to those deeply-personal moments.

Of course, we also read many stories about how state parks represent simple fun to Washingtonians: The everyday hike, the favorite campsite, a familiar bike ride. The levity of these experiences didn’t lighten our interpretation of the tone we needed to strike… rather, it expanded it. Our research signaled clearly that the brand outcome needed to allow for all of these feelings to coexist simultaneously.

Practically speaking, we understood that we couldn’t choose a single activity or emotion to elevate within the logo; we’d instead need to select natural imagery that could both act as an emotional vessel and communicate a recognizable place-based identity. But beyond helpfully narrowing the brief in terms of imagery-type, the research insights also gave us a clear lens for testing our visual ideas. At every stage of brand development, we now knew to ask ourselves: "In this landscape, could someone imagine getting married, while another remembered spreading their father's ashes? Would this image feel like it could encompass the best moment in someone's life, and yet also offer someone peace and healing from their worst pain? Can it look like a fun place for a casual jog, while also seeming appropriate as a place of profound feeling?"

What we created, in the logo's final form, is a geographic fiction: We combined landscape elements from across the state in a scene that doesn’t exist in any one place — yet it still intrinsically “reads” as Washington. This allowed us to respond to the client's original geographic representation pain-point… while also, crucially, explicitly building in space for personal emotional projection within the landscape by avoiding single-note expression in our symbolism and color choices.

We wouldn't have known about the importance of this approach without the research effort at the beginning: Balancing place-certainty and emotional-uncertainty was an unexpected strategy arising directly from the time we invested in pre-design thinking.