recent work
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
BRAND + APPLICATION
Second Half Advisers
After spending 10 years as the co-founder and CEO of a successful social impact marketing agency, the founder of Second Half Advisers (2HA) decided it was time to help other aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own companies. As a collegiate athlete himself, and the Director of Development for an NCAA D1 Women’s Softball team, he wanted to create a brand that brought his passion for sports, and his entrepreneurial expertise, together in a way that would resonate with business-minded coaches and early-stage founders alike.
During our first three-week sprint with 2HA, we held several virtual workshops together to dig-into the ethos behind the name, explore different paths for the brand’s visual tone, and begin crafting the narrative. We ultimately presented three potential concepts, each with its own unique personality — yet all still laddering back to the founder’s vision, as well as his deep understanding of his audience.
Once we decided on a tonal direction, we moved into the second three-week sprint, where we developed a complete visual identity system, brand narrative, and comprehensive brand guidelines document.
We also created wireframes and a notional copy deck for 2HA’s website, giving the founder a tactical application for the brand work, as well as a head-start on building the website once he was ready.
BRAND + COMMUNITY DESIGN
Way of Being
Being creatives ourselves, we’re no stranger to all of the wonderful opportunities and experiences this industry can offer. But what most people don’t see from the outside are the incredible challenges — stress, anxiety, fatigue, diminished motivation and self-worth — that often go hand-in-hand with working in a career where your output is constantly commoditized, capitalized, and judged. (Don’t even get us started on how demoralizing it is to have an algorithm tell you to make your big idea “more safe.”)
After seeing so many of our friends and colleagues struggling, we decided to start a peer community — Way of Being — that would become a safe space for creatives to connect and support each other, provide opportunities to talk about how to fix the broken system, and generally, be a bright spot in an often unforgiving field.
We knew we needed to create a visual identity for the project that wasn’t so “soft and soothing” in nature that it would feel like well-washing, but that also wasn’t so anti-establishment that people might be scared to join in case their managers found out.
We spent several weeks exploring visual directions that ranged from organic and unfiltered to bold and color-blocked, and ultimately, landed on a mixed-media identity that captures the hands-on, irregular, and slightly rebellious spirit that’s at the heart of so many creatives’ personalities.
Once the core elements were defined, we designed a complete brand system (including positioning language), built the concept and pitch decks, created all of the assets for the community platform, and refined the messaging to get Way of Being off the ground.
If you’re interested in finding out more, or joining our little pod of amazing creative humans, check out WOB here.
BRAND + PRODUCT DESIGN
WIN | WIN
With everything going on in the world, people are craving little glimmers of hope and positivity now more than ever. The founder of WIN | WIN recognized that countless athletes, sports teams, brands, nonprofit partners, were already making these glimmers happen — but that their stories were being untold or under-leveraged, buried in the 24/7 news cycle that’s dominated by chaos and fear.
This “aha” realization quickly turned into a business idea, and the founder began building the blueprint for a media and lifestyle brand that would elevate the positive impact and culture-changing potential of sports philanthropy — not just by amplifying the good that’s already happening, but by actively creating more moments, experiences, partnerships to make these stories possible. That’s where ethik came in.
During our initial six-week sprint, we focused on crafting two main deliverables: the company’s overarching visual system, and its high-level positioning. We approached these two in parallel, instead of sequentially, because we worked collaboratively with the founder as an extension of WIN | WIN, and building everything together as a single team. The tangible brand deliverables were important, of course — but we were also intimately involved in defining the brand’s long-term vision, structure, and even some of its product offerings, all of which evolved multiple times over the course of the sprint.
Once the core visual and positioning elements were in place, we began designing the platforms, templates, and investor pitch decks that were needed to bring W|W to life. With such an incredible early response from advisors and potential funding partners, ethik is now WIN | WIN’s brand AOR, and we couldn’t be more excited about helping to build the future of the company together.
Stay tuned. The official launch is coming soon.
