The principals of Calphis approached Kenneth White Design to create a logo that would market them as professional, forward-thinking and enjoyable to bring on board. With an extraordinary deadline we not only fulfilled the brief, we fulfilled it with style.

Application developers have developed a bad reputation over the years for being loners behind a computer screen, hiding out and drinking beer. Our goal was to position Calphis in a way that showed them as approachable, professional developers who work collaboratively as a team and share knowledge. (Okay, and they drink a beer or two on occasion.)

We’re looking forward to more branding with Calphis in the future. Our ideas for visual and word play are endless.

The Tennessee Arts Commission needed a postcard to promote its upcoming Artist Fellowship, and Kenneth White Design jumped at the opportunity. Directed to create three concepts around the humorous ways you can say “dollars,” we came to the presentation with three solid finalists.

The chosen design below:

The other candidates:

Following on the heels of the Evan Baines Photography identity, Kenneth White Design built a custom gallery and blog website. Keeping with the brand values of clean, classic, and timeless images, the expression of the site was kept to a minimum. It was important to let the photography speak for itself and to let the design reinforce the brand.

In addition to the front-end looks, the site back-end had to allow Evan to update everything. We structured the site in WordPress so he could feed the hompage slideshow, all the galleries and his blog posts through one simple interface. All he has to do is publish one article, and the site will publish the photos in that article as he directs them. This was a key departure from the way traditional photography sites work—keeping the blog and the gallery as separate entities which causes double the work.

Check out www.evanbaines.com.

CREDITS
Client: Evan Baines Photography

PROPS
I want to give a big shout-out to those who backed us up on this project. It always helps to have friends around who know more than you do.
Justin Meyers – Plastic Monument
Jason Moran and Isreal Orange
Marc Sexton – I Must Build

Nokian Tires contacted Kenneth White Design to create unique signs for their dealers that would still fall within the guidelines of the brand, but be fun and eye-catching at the same time. The winning direction utilizes their best selling tire’s tread as the base for a pattern behind the logo and brand message.

Another direction, shown below, used rhomboids to represent leaves. Being green is another important part of the Nokian brand that would have been reinforced in this concept.

Using a mathematical algorithm to generate the pattern, both of these sign concepts could be digitally printed so that each one would be completely unique!

Evan Baines, an award-winning bridal and commercial photographer, approached Kenneth White Design with the need to create a elegant mark that would lead his brand message of exceptional attention to detail and impeccable quality. He needed an identity that would look at home on the pages of a high-fashion bridal magazine and that would also function well embossed into photos or letterpressed on fine cover paper.

After the initial interview, Kenneth White Design came back with a round of sketches that ran the gamut from whimsical to refined. A clear group of favorites emerged very quickly during the design review—the competition were choosing marks that were frilly, trendy and organic. To set himself apart from the crowd, Evan Baines wanted an identity that was clean, classic, and timeless.

Once the direction of the design had focused on the upscale message, a final round of candidate logos were created. The sketch that Evan had originally been excited about was now the clear choice. The mark would go through one more round of intricate refinement before being released to the world. Kenneth White Design created a style guide to complement the finished identity so that everywhere the mark was applied by Evan Baines or his staff, it would reinforce the brand message.

Check out the entry on the design of his new website.

CREDITS
Client: Evan Baines Photography

Sometimes websites can be a tag-team effort requiring separate programmers, writers, designers, and other specialized talents. The Hope Unlimited website is one of those sites, where Kenneth White Design was called in for assistance on the programming side while the designers at Robin Easter Design focused on the look and feel.


Check out the site.


CREDITS
Client: Robin Easter Group

Designer: Heather Kerchner

Coding: Benjamin Finch, Heather Kerchner, Kenneth White

As part of my work with Iostudio and the National Guard over several years, we were asked to redesign the Guard site on a biannual basis to keep up with new technologies that could excite the audience, better facilitate online recruitment and aid with efficient information gathering.

Unfortunately, we can’t show the new design for this year because it is still in development. However, here is the design direction from Kenneth White for the site as it appeared in 2006.





CREDITS
Client: Iostudio, LLC

How do you create a frozen environment with no time and little budget? You freeze the senses. While at Iostudio, Kenneth White was asked to create a back wall and supporting graphics for a bar that would catch the attention of consumers and support the Liquid Ice brand.

2009 AIGA Nashville Case Awards – Merit Award Winner – Brand Identity Design

AIGA Nashville approached Iostudio to help them design a logo and collateral for their sustainable design initiative, Design is Green. Since typography and logos are Kenneth White’s specialty, it was a perfect chance to design a beautifully simple mark.


After eliminating the tired cliches of leaves, recycling symbols and icons of the Earth, I discovered a treatment of the lowercase “g” that begged to become a sprout growing from the baseline of the word “Dig”.





From there, the mark designed itself. It was just a matter of refining more and more until the shapes were open and graceful in both black and white and full color.


CREDITS
Client: Iostudio, LLC, AIGA Nashville

Even though some projects may never see the light of day in production, they are still worth mention because they follow the Kenneth White Design mantra of good communication that creates an emotional response. These spreads from a proposed design for the National Guard, working through Iostudio, were intended to do just that. The catalog was to serve as a reference book of everything someone would need to know about the Guard before making the decision to join.

Below » Three concepts for the front cover.







Below » Four sample spreads.









CREDITS
Client: Iostudio, LLC
Design: Kenneth White

Good branding is about being consistent, but being consistent doesn’t have to be boring. It all starts one-piece-at-a-time, slowly building the image vocabulary that is applied across banners, posters, point-of-purchase, and eventually even to environmental graphics.

While visual design is only one small piece of what makes a good brand, it is almost always responsible for giving a product or service its first impression. Consumers use the perceived quality of the visual experience to frame their understanding and trust of the product.

One of the first projects that began to shape Nokian Tires North American marketing was a backlit sign for the headquarters lobby.


Right away, the goal of Kenneth White Design was to begin building a visual vocabulary built on common winter elements remixed with deconstructions of snow tires. By turning the positive qualities of the products into those things associated with winter, the customer could begin tying those concepts together while learning more about the product.




After the success of the corporate interior styling, we began exploring ways to expand this vibrant, new vocabulary into the summer and all-weather lines.


At this point, we had built enough of the visual vocabulary of the brand. Now it was time to start bringing together the various treatments of the logo, brand colors and supporting typography used differently by each design vendor. No one knew when to use the tagline, what colors to use, how to position the logo, etc. We suggested creating a brand standards guide to insure a standard logo treatment and consistent font choices.








Ultimately, the brand standards for all of Nokian Tyres—North American and International—would be brought under a single standard using uniform typograpyh and colors. The dealership lobby signs below represent the shift to a friendlier typeface and the use of green as the new brand identifier.

Designing information is always a treat to me. The Fraternal Order of Police approached Iostudio about the possibility of creating a monthly magazine. This media kit was part of our presentation.

CREDITS
Client: Iostudio, LLC

Over the years, Kenneth White Design has created more logos than can be counted on one person’s digits. From manufacturing to service to technology to cultural endeavors, below is a sampling of some of the best.

Robin Easter Design Group | Lucky Seven Design | Industry: Advertising/Design

Arts on the Move | Actor’s Co-op | DIG: Design is Green | Industry: Culture

Aim Printing | Tweek | Industry: Printing — Arch-i-form | Industry: Architecture

Veterenary Advisory Council | Industry: Pet Health — Nashville Dominican Sisters’ Education Fund | Industry: Education — Skinzen Salon & Spa | Industry: Healthcare & Wellness

Manta Acoustics | Telesystems | Industry: Technology

Custom type design work can arrive in may forms from language needs to logo fonts to illustration. In this instance, Kenneth White Design was asked to create a typeface based on the logo for the famous country couture star, Manuel.

Manuel has created spectacular rhinestone western-wear for Jack White, Loretta Lynn, Porter Wagoner, Dwight Yoakam, Gillian Welch, and Johnny Cash to name a few. Taking a lead from his wild creations, we went beyond a regular alphabet and created an extra set of letters that reached over and under the words for that extra bit of flair.

A set of connecting lines and brackets were also added to the font to allow for some creative discovery from the designers who might be using the font.

Credit
Client: Studio Plush / Heather Dryden

Sometimes it’s nice to just be able to do fun work with people you love. Every year a group of friends and I have a lake trip, and every year we compile a mixed CD to celebrate the sun and relaxation. These CD’s greeted everyone as they arrived at the lake house and reached for that first beverage of the weekend.

GX: The Guard Experience, the National Guard’s premier publication, was much more than guns, heroes and “Hooah!” It was also an important vehicle to help soldiers and their families deal with important issues that arose while they were away from home such as communication, employment or education.

Kenneth White Design created this post to highlight GX magazine’s family-oriented editorial design. GX also contained content directly related to the soldier and their history, which can be found under “Military Lifestyle.”

CREDITS
Client: Iostudio, LLC
Design: Kenneth White

When it comes to designing editorial for the National Guard’s premier publication, GX: The Guard Experience, history and national pride were hard subjects to make new and exciting. That’s where the communication challenge began and Kenneth White Design stepped up to the plate.

GX started as a magazine that was not only targeted to soldiers, but also to their families. Respectively, we’ve divided the editorial design into two sections, “Family Focus” and “Military Lifestyle,” shown below.

History

A portion of the content of GX was not just news and current events, but important events in the history of the National Guard.


Reenactment maps are just about the driest content you can feature in a military magazine, usually represented by flat 2-D maps, lines, boxes and arrows. I wanted to bring the Battle of New Orleans to life on the page and make readers feel like it was happening as they were reading the narrative. With cannon fire, dust from fast moving cavalry and deadly skirmishes in American redoubts, the map is reinvented and entertaining.

Contemporary

Some of the articles also dealt with technology or current events, giving the design a chance to be open and break the grid.

Strength

It was difficult to design for a military audience and still maintain some degree of design freshness. Layouts had a tendency to fall into a stiff, reverential style with red or blue headlines and no personality. So it was my goal to create a feeling of strength within layouts that were also visually appealling and dynamic.

Illustrative

Using illustration is a great way to give a presence to abstract ideas like “progress” or “employment.” Working with outside illustrators was something we enjoyed greatly, but sometimes a last minute shortening of the articles, the deadline or the budget would leave us no other choice but to create illustrations ourselves.

The article below features the eclectic work of Gina Binkley with matching sign-painter-styled typography created by Kenneth White Design.





It was quite an honor to work with the amazingly talented Dan Page. The topics of the article were so broad, we were worried there wouldn’t be enough substance to produce worthwhile concepts. When he came back with the injection-molded family, that was classic.





Below are some of the illustrations I produced.









CREDITS
Client: Iostudio, LLC
Design: Kenneth White

You are the president of American subsidiary of an international corporation. You have one week before a visit from the executives. What do you do to spruce up your office for the big meeting? You give a call to Kenneth White Design and let the creative mind go to work for you.

The total time from the minute we were called until the project was complete and ready to show was one week. Not only did we come up with a great solution, but it was planned and structured to maximize our time and our impact.

As soon as the project was started, we met with Nokian Tires to discuss the possibilities and measure the space. We wanted to have the office feel as though it was branded without plastering the walls with ads that would become dated in a year. Our solution was to create two murals based on seasonal driving conditions that would appear to fill the entire hallway. The foundation of the art would be elements of past Nokian advertising, parts of the design of the tires themselves and new artwork to echo the seasons and bring the vibrant compositions together. By breaking the murals into differing frame widths, we were able to accomodate the irregular floorplan.


In the plan, the entrance is on the left with the art flowing down the main hall and a side hall of the office. Each different width of frame is color-coded and numbered to match with a division in the mural.

Below is a sample of both the left (the top two) and the right murals. Following are full sized samples of each of the different widths.









Although the pictures don’t do it justice, it helps to see the final installation.





Months after the art was placed, everyone at Nokian had claimed a favorite cross-section… usually the one right next to their personal office doors.

The murals would later become so popular that they became the framework for the following year’s campaign.

CREDITS
Art Direction: Kenneth White
Design: Andrew Nixon, Kenneth White

Type design is a special love of mine, and Kenneth White Design loves the opportunity to either alter letterforms in a design or create a whole new typeface from scratch. While working on GX: The Guard Experience Magazine, I wanted to find a font that had a letterpressed feel. Unfortunately, the fonts that were on the market at that time didn’t have the personality and cantankerousness I wanted.

The solution was to take a type specimen from different wood types—thanks Andrew for the samples—and make them into one font. The greatest challenge of this project was creating new letters that didn’t exist in the specimen.



Design by Andrew Nixon.

Skinzen needed a way to promote their services on a narrow budget. The challenge with limited color printing is to create graphics that are striking but not stark. Here, Kenneth White Design came up with a visual vocabulary that could be applied everywhere from ads to signage to the web while still keeping the look fun and exciting.