Nicholas Rox Bartman

An annual report to our public & private stakeholders, this document serves as a recap of our year's efforts to advance our mission and move forward with our strategic corporate vision.

As our business expands the imperative of educating and influencing our existing partners, while we reach out to potential new partners, only grows. Part of our effort to educate and influence, our mailed media kit brings our branding to our audience in a tangible way - with printed pieces, a digital video display, a personalized letter, and a notebook/pen for daily use.

I'm proud to have been able to assist TBG with their rebrand, including a full redesign on their logo, every aspect of their visual brand language, and a full branding style guide.

Her clients were established in their careers and typically at director level or above in title, and her group's bandwidth meant only being able to service so many customers at a time. This posed a challenge I hadn't worked on solving before; appealing to a small selection of potential customers, while also filtering out people in their early or mid-career years.

By pursuing visual traits from industries like wealth management, architecture, and insurance, a solution emerged and we were able to find a look that could suggest stability, confidence, and just a high enough level of sophistication.

Mid-America Careers came to me for help with their rebranding effort. The scope of the project was pretty wide; A full redesign on their logo, direction on color, font, photography, etc., and a full branding style guide.

Through research and exploration we were able to aim the brand toward the client's intended audiences or 'personas'. The tricky part was casting a wide enough net to be inclusive of all groups on the audience spectrum, but feel unified and specific in our brand presence.

Leaning heavily on traditional design, and encouraging modern aesthetic trends, the gap was bridged between older customers and their millennial counterparts, while staying true to the brand's core constituency; Middle America.

See the new look and feel in action here:
www.midamericacareers.com

Our Spring Workbook is the brand's opportunity to refresh it's look and feel. All other collateral for the brand will follow this example. It's a tricky task, as our brand must feel similar enough to be recognizable, but fresh enough to feel NEW. 

Process:
1. Design leads a creative brainstorm with key stakeholders to evaluate and anticipate needs and challenges for each iteration of our yearly workbook, then sets a schedule for review, concepts visual updates to the brand, and works through tone and message with marketing. 

2. Design leads an exploration into photography and storytelling by reaching out to a photographer, discussing parameters for visual direction, and working through budget, timing, and resources.

3. Design leads art direction on photoshoot and review of assets with marketing team.

4. Design leads several rounds of asset and concept review with stakeholders to ensure all needs are met from a business perspective. 

5. Design executes workbook layout and review, proofing, pre-press, and coordination with printing partners.

Our Spring Workbook is the brand's opportunity to refresh it's look and feel. All other collateral for the brand will follow this example. It's a tricky task, as our brand must feel similar enough to be recognizable, but fresh enough to feel NEW. This year's workbook maintained some of the wood textures found in our material over the years, while introducing new text treatment, photo treatment (An new images from our yearly shoot), new background textures, and a different approach to our information layout. The method for displaying products was warmly received by our sales team, so the basic structure is intact form 2014's version.

The stacked view shows how the selection of textures helps tie each page to the next, and unify the look and feel we're presenting. As we move more and more away from workers, toward outdoorsmen, our presence needs to carry textures (seen below) relevant to that setting.

Because one of our brand pillars is to be RUGGED, our type is treated by using a texture for a distressed look, which goes hand in hand with the rugged background textures throughout.

Not that can't have some fun though - a UV coat was applied to the logo and copy/icon on the font page to give help provide depth, while a recess was used on the spine as a unique way to reinforce the words 'SPRING 2015'.

When we advertise at Stanley It's almost always aimed at customers rather than consumers. But ads are ads, and whether they appear in Outside Magazine or a trade publication on the eve of a HUGE outdoor industry trade show, we still lean on them spread the word about our newest products and events. 

The following ads appeared in the Outdoor Retailer Daily publication over the last four Outdoor Retailer tradeshows dating back to last year. (Two winter, two summer.)

Trade ads are some of my most enjoyable projects over the years. Nowhere else are we asked to cram so much information into such a small space, with so little time to make a first impression. The challenge of brainstorming a concept, pushing our boundaries stylistically, and trying to come up with the most compelling few words of copy we can means the process is never dull. We start with a blank slate every time, and the exercise helps us in a way to understand our own voice better.

The Stanley Workbook is a biannual publication that serves as both a sales tool and a key brand asset. The main challenge each year is to develop a piece that functions well as a part of sales’ arsenal, but also conveys the character of brand that has been fueling outdoor adventures for over 100 years.

After several years on shelf in its previous form, Stanley packaging was ready for a refresh. First step was an evaluation of current packaging of competitors and brands across all relevant channels. A determination was made on information hierarchy, and a general level of distance from old look and feel was settled on.

The challenge: How do you keep new packaging in the same ballpark as what customers are used to seeing, but make enough of an update to appear different, and aligned with relevant packaging/design trends?

The solution was to drop our badge and use dynamic angles to create a new place for the logo to live. The logo and copy block remained in a similar place both positionally and hierarchically.

The key addition is the icon tray on front and back, listing what research shows to be relevant factors in purchasing habits; thermal claims, materials, and insulation type.

Marketing copy was refreshed and relocated, a new system for calling out features and benefits was added (including renderings for reference), and a new approach to 'violators' was explored.

Lastly, as the product line was being shuffled into three distinct lines - Classic, Adventure, and Mountain - a color-specific series callout tag was implemented across all packaging. 

The result is a refreshed look and feel that plays well across all packaging types - from wraps to colorboxes - and can be translated easily to merchandisers, PDQ trays, and pallet skirts.

For as long back as anyone can remember, consumers have been sending Stanley their product stories. For Stanley's 100th Anniversary, the top 100 stories were collected and printed in a rugged, leather bound, hardcover book, designed to look and feel as authentic as the stories it holds.

Due to ever increasing needs for Stanley photography, we recently decided to rent a photo studio for an afternoon and pursue photography that doesn't require a huge dent to a budget or a trip to a national forest.

These are the early results. Intended use at the moment is social media needs (Facebook primarily) and the brand website.

As a growing force in the outdoor channel, the Stanley brand has developed an appetite for product photography. Over the last few years we've begun scheduling and executing two yearly photoshoots to coincide with our Spring and Fall product releases.

The intent of these efforts has been to capture our newest products in action, set in locations that reflect what our end users would most likely encounter. A cooler full of beer down by the lake for an afternoon of fishing isn't a whimsical scenario, it's a literal Stanley moment. Our job is to point a lens at those moments and push them all the way through to print.

Over the last few years we've criss-crossed the Pacific Northwest for local photoshoots, with great results. But this year we pushed for a new location....TAHOE NATIONAL FOREST. As authentic a setting as you'll find for outdoor adventures.

My role in this shoot started with the up front brainstorming on scene ideas, and carried through to the art direction on location. But considering the higher stakes (and higher budget) of an out-of-state shoot, I thought it worthwhile to bring my own camera along (7D) and turn the focus back toward the photographer and crew for some behind-the-scenes footage.

Final images from this shoot will first appear in the STANLEY SPRING 2015 WORKBOOK, sometime in early June.

For the Stanley brand to get the word out on recent press success, new items, events, and changes to strategy or positioning in sales, we need to have a presence at trade shows. Namely, the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, one of the largest trade shows nationally for the outdoor industry.

This provides an exciting opportunity for a Creative Development Lead, especially with a brand tailored for this setting. My involvement starts with initial conversations and brainstorms with the Global Marketing Manager regarding booth updates, which forms the basis of direction to the booth building agency. Once creative has been set, design and direction for the large format needs takes place, and once they're clear the focus pivots to smaller items to support marketing, sales, and product management on everything from press event collateral to mock-up packaging for new items making their debuts.

All in all, its one of the most rewarding projects that comes around each year (twice per year), but the icing is physically traveling to the show and putting the finishing touches on layout and merchandising of our featured display areas, which you see in the images above. It's a very tangible result, and fulfilling.

The Style Guide is probably the most complex project to hit my desk in my career. It's such an essential component for any brand if there's an interest in maintaining visual standards. Especially a global brand. 

The look and feel had been evolving for some time, little by little, but not everyone was on the same page across all of our marketing and sales spectrum. The first step in fixing that was to shift our look and feel; away from orange textures and toward something that resembles the environment our products should be used in, i.e. add some wood! Once the look was officially nailed down I started the long process of gathering assets and making determinations on standards that control everything from tradeshow booth building to lifestyle photography.

Any one of our distributors can, and has, used this tool to effectively synchronize our visual presence from press event to retail shelf space.

Great challenge. Great project. Happy users.