This is the logo for a startup funded by Houghton Mifflin. They are textbook publishers. Our client put himself through college working as a prison guard. That’s how you know someone really wants to go to college. He was in charge of a new division that taught teachers how to teach certain subjects.
The brand is based on the name for a gourd, which is a community vessel and food carrier in many parts of the world. The logo came from that wonderful penmanship chart that graced the top of many classroom lackboards. For us, it said “teaching” in a very simple, eloquent way.

This was a dream assignment that almost turned into a disaster. A friend of ours, Pat Marcoccia, became creative director of an ad agency in San Francisco. We moved in with them, figured out who they were, put a strategy on the table, and renamed them. We gave the illustration assignment to J. Otto Siebold, a famous children’s book illustrator. He lost interest halfway through the project. Thankfully there was enough work on the table that our designer was able to squeeze out everything we needed. We were originally going to do a different business card for everyone in the shop, but we landed on doing one for girls and one for boys, which worked out just fine.

That logo with the exclamation point is plastered all over cars in Mill Valley. We took an organization called the Mill Valley Schools Community Foundation and walked out of a two-hour board meeting with a name change. The new name became the core of a campaign that raised millions of dollars over five years for art, music, poetry and drama programs in our local school district. We have actually done a fair amount of branding work for non-profits. But there is an added level of excitement when you see your work all over town..

The Stoke identity grew out of the personality of the founder, a guy who comes across as bigger than life. What they’re working on addresses the needs of the heavy iron part of the telco business. The name is a powerful verb, a surfing term among others. So we started playing with stencils and big, bold ways to treat the name. And, as an added bonus, the “O” is actually two telephones talking to each other. In the first campaign, we started working with some old Life magazine photography. Maybe we did a better job of bringing Life back to life than they did. They apparently have tried a number of times. Too bad. It was a great magazine.