After making the decision to move to a new city and a build out my career, I knew it was imperative to make an impact with my personal branding. The unique challenge involved developing an identity not only for a freelance professional, but for very specific experiences associated with building a network of new colleagues.

I coined the name Design That Talks, as my freelance company, and now needed to build a professional image without losing ‘me’ in the process. Before starting with any of the designs, I needed to step back and think about how I was going to approach people and companies and what I wanted their first interaction with me to be. Being a traditionalist, I knew hand written letters and face-to-face communication were going to be the primary tools.

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Media Access is a fully integrated media solutions company whose services include sponsorship, TV production, TV content creation, on-line and mobile content creation as well as event management and marketing. This task was about turning a small job on it’s head and investing a bit of extra time and ‘zest’ into creating something that is robust for the client, in order to enable them to appear established and be competitive.

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My approach to most identity projects usually begins with simply allowing ideas to spin around in my head for a few days before sitting down to sketch. For me, it is usually not too helpful to start off with developing a long list of words or to develop any sort of mind map on paper/screen. Of course, what is referred to as “mind mapping” is most likely always happening in some form or another despite not being put to paper. After all, aren’t we as designers hired because of our ability to make connections that may not be immediately apparent to non-designers? I’d like to think so.

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During the episode entitled “The Second Coming,” in the final season of the Sopranos, Anthony Jr., deep in the throws of depression and disaffected with the world, rants to his family at dinner about the food being unsafe because the FDA is allowing companies to spray viruses onto food to combat bacteria.

While much of the sopranos was fictional, AJ’s outburst was actually founded on semi-recent developments. Earlier that year, Intralytix, a Baltimore company that manufactures phage-based products to kill bacteria on food, had been given the green light by the FDA for one of their lines of phage-based food safety products.

I was approached by Intralytix because they had decided it was time to attend to their brand, which had been pretty much an afterthought up until that point. There was no clear visual identity. Employees had home-made business cards with different iterations of logos and colors. It was clear that given the public scrutiny they were receiving coupled with the desire to grow, they needed to develop a viable brand.

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Based on an eclectic array of influences, the task was to collaborate with the owners to help determine naming convention, overall brand positioning and design an identity system for a new, Asian/Malaysian inspired eatery and retail shop.

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