The Giving Advisory
Brand Identity, Digital & Stationery Implementation
Developed within Metamorph Marketing | 💵 Finance | 🫴 Ancillary
5 months
The Challenge:
Matt and Brian were establishing a new private ancillary fund designed to help sophisticated investors support ongoing charity initiatives in a new, contemporary way. While still in the early stages of the company's founding process and still searching for a name, they knew that a modern but refined concept was needed to spur the brand towards success.
The Solution:
Working with Samantha Leffler and the team at Metamorph Marketing, we developed a contemporary brand identity for The Giving Advisory, one that represents a corporation but with geometric Memphis assets that position the financial fund towards a modern and steadfast direction. The brand identity was transformed into multiple social, digital and stationery assets, representing its scalability and capacity to create modern experiences for the financial brand and its customers.
Key Features & Highlights
How can brands be built while the company is still being created, and shaping the company’s vision in the process?
The Approach
With The Giving Advisory's unique position as a private ancillary fund designed to make charitable giving accessible to sophisticated investors, particularly high-income millennials just before the Great Inheritance period, the brand needed to speak to a new kind of financial player who is going beyond financial benefits and towards legacy and community impact.
My role was to shape a brand identity while the company itself was still being formed, using design to reflect the founders' vision and help shape and iterate on it throughout the process as their vision evolved.
Through concept development supported by a rationale of the positioning using Jungian archetypes, iterative wordmark exploration, and a carefully considered colour system, The Giving Advisory emerged as a brand that is both corporate and contemporary; one that earns the trust of the sophisticated investor while signalling a bolder, more generous vision for what financial advisory can be in the modern era.
The Outcome
The Reflection
This was my first time utilising my public relations and brand communications skills to leverage and understand how to carve out the desired brand for the team. Moving from this experience, I continued to consider Jungian archetypes as a foundation for brand-building products, experimenting further with combining archetypes for holistic, dynamic brands, seen in the Young Wisdom and MQ University Incubator’s ‘Secondary Schools’ program, and in the development of Seals’ branding.
Additional learnings:
Working on multiple phases of iterations reminded me not to treat the initial concept as the final (and as my darling). While initial discussions suggested a traditional, serif-style design, continuous iterations and refinement revealed that those sketches did not align with the true vision of the brand. It eventually evolved to be a combination of the first concept and the second, more geometric and angular design that felt corporate yet modern.
Collaboration with senior designers and managers gives short-term ideas and long-term growth. Collaborating with Sam (the senior designer of the team) and iterating from her feedback alongside Shahe’s allowed me to understand more about the role of accessibility in font choices and colours, which refined my practice for future projects such as Galaxa.
Compared to iterating in design, building brands with scalability is significant early on. Though the concept of the brand and the assets continuously evolve, applying the principles of scalability, such as applying brand elements and patterns across multiple stationery and web designs, is crucial. Colours and fonts can change, but if the logotype can't adapt into a favicon or a pattern cannot be developed on
