The InHouse Brand

As I mentioned here, we are taking April to focus on our company and where we would like to see ourselves in the future. One of the things that was really weighing on us was our brand. We have invested a lot of time and energy building a brand that is recognizable and stands for something. We have always strived to run a different type of production company, one with character or personality as you might have heard me say.

While I have always liked our identity, it was certainly in need of a tune up. Kerry worked really hard while we were away at Tribal to re-launch our brand at EXPO West. From new t-shirts to a simple take away card for prospective clients to new business cards, she really outdid herself. While at the show we received many compliments on our take away card and we were all proud handing out cards with the correct address, phone number, etc…I know, not that big of a step forward, but you would be surprised.

The most important part of the process was updating the logo.

Our brand is now becoming familiar to our clients and we certainly want to preserve the brand equity that we have built. When you come to an event and you see people wearing our “jeans and black t-shirt” production outfit, you know it is an InHouse event. We like that. So how to update without drifting too far? It turns out the typeface we had chosen in the very early days, Gil Sans has become horrendously outdated due to it’s ubiquitous usage throughout the world of design. While it certainly isn’t like Papyrus, it isn’t timeless either. So this was the first thing to go.

Then it was on to our diamonds. We always get the feedback - you look like Mitsubishi - which almost always invokes a “really, you are the first person to tell me that”. While there may be some resemblance the diamonds carry a special meaning to me as they were the coming together of creative services to form InHouse. When we started the company, we were in the middle of the DV revolution. Final Cut Pro, the XL1 and the G4 were allowing creative opportunities like never before and you had young kids such as myself able to create without limitation. I always enviousness a company that brought it all together - audio, design, images, motion graphics, etc…. To me, the diamonds represent this process. That being said, they were looking a little tired, so we tightened them up - a vector based plastic surgery so to speak. Now they look much better in my opinion. Because we are using them more as a single brand element, this was very important.

We will have some more cool changes coming, such as finally posting examples of our work online, but for now, I think the brand redesign has been very successful and important to our future success. I hope you like it!