30 years old Rohail already runs a successful real-estate business in Houston and he partnered with even younger partner Jerzy who is still in University, studying videography. Together they started a passion project at the end of 2021, they wanted a media conglomerate and to access the untapped potential that Houston has to offer.
Houston is a cultural melting pot where all kinds of cuisines, traditions, sport and social movements enchant your senses and enrich your experience. Many cultural manifestations are often expressed through food.
It’s the 4th largest city in the US after Chicago and it might claim the number 3 spot, however, it doesn’t have the representation that the other big cities have. There was a gap that needed to be filled.
- Creative Direction
- Visual foundations
- Brand Identity
- Agile Planning
Their dream and vision is to create a recognizable brand that produces evergreen, feel-good content. To shape a like-minded community promoting collaboration and to highlight the best the city has to offer.
At the end of 2021, near the winter holidays, HTT needed an Identity and a Voice.
Time is running out and they even had to iron out the legal aspects of their newly created business, it ran longer than expected.
It needed to be done fast so that they could launch their social media and start promoting stories in video format.
The teams and creatives that they were interviewing with did not align with their values and couldn’t work within such a short time frame. I stood out because I was curious and cared about their story attitude and had lots of energy.
They hired a social media agency before having a brand, there were now two weeks left.
Jerzy is participating in building it together with CultCat and the community. They saw the work we did for The Systm DAO (Decentralized community), in the “#show your work” Discord channel and our stylescapes painted a very good impression of what a real brand would look like, from typography, to logo, a content production studio, big scale, small scale design assets. And it felt like it had meaning and story involved. And they decided to call us.
A call was scheduled where my main focus was on understanding their story, the goals, and the cultural aspects that would later form the basis for a strong HTT’s visual identity and voice.
Can we do this in such a way that we don’t sacrifice meaning and quality?
Yes, with an agile workflow.
You have to commit to this, because without your involvement, this is not possible.
For agile projects to work, we need to become friends 😁, we’re going to see each other often until this is finished.
We met almost daily over the course of 13 days. I made sure they were involved every step of the way, we got live feedback and then we implemented fast. HTT always had access to what was being built and was up to date. Bliss, nonjudgmental, new, fresh, empowered was the vibe they were looking for.
Jerzy had facilitated a light Strategy and CORE for HTT. They had a content strategy done, I read about the personas, user journeys, a bit of brand messaging, and attribute clustering.
The driving force for the identity was the strategy.
They needed a full style guide that could guide them on how they use it in merchandising, video production, photography, typography, messaging, content, even interior design, a library of visual assets and creative direction.
For this style guide, we didn’t build the actual assets, we provided suggestions and creative direction with curated and brand coded examples.
I had my team, if someone didn’t have capacity or time, someone else stepped in.
I saw Houston sports teams and I knew what they would go for.
Print collateral made from glowing acrylic, transparent business cards caught their eye.
