The toolworks.org website launch completes our rebrand for Toolworks, a self-supporting nonprofit that is devoted to helping people with disabilities connect with the opportunities in their community. After redesigning their identity and stationery system, we created templates for their day to day operational needs, brand guidelines and began work on bringing their brand to life through their website.

With a stream-lined site structure and media-rich content, the new website enables Toolworks to spotlight their client success stories. Our strong attention to accessibility ensures past, present and future clients and supporters will also be able to navigate the site with ease. We built the site on top of WordPress, an easy to use content management system, to allow Toolworks the flexibility to maintain the website themselves, with support from Iron when needed.

The new website allows Toolworks to focus on running and promoting the social ventures that allow them to provide social services to over 500 individuals with disabilities every year. Their latest endeavor, Bakeworks, was featured on Huffington Post San Francisco.

As part of our commitment to working with companies dedicated to social good, we recently launched a new brand identity for local start-up Genability. Genability is focused on making electricity usage more elastic, distributed, renewable and clean. They are currently building the world’s most complete and accurate database of energy prices, as well as the next generation of cloud services for managing, forecasting and optimizing energy.

The logo we developed explores the use of Fibonacci spirals and kinetic energy. We wanted the mark to create a sense of motion and energy to represent the give and take of the network Genability will build.

To learn more about Genability, visit www.genability.com

This month we launched a new brand identity for Toolworks – a nonprofit organization that creates social and economic opportunities for people with disabilities. Our objective was to refresh the overall look and feel of the brand – from the group’s printed materials to its web presence.

In order to develop the new creative we helped reposition the organization, developing a fully-fledged strategic brief. The goal of the creative became to embody the new strategy, while capturing Toolworks’ unconventional spirit and uninhibited commitment to getting the job done. As such, the visual language we developed needed to reference the organization’s boldness and passion while presenting a unique, modern front.

Simple, elegant, san serif typography is treated with a progressive color palette and the interlocking double “O” motif suggest cooperation, strength and partnership. All key tenets of the brand strategy. The web site is under development and we’ll follow up with news of its launch in the coming months.

The featured logo is for the Feld Institute, a seminar-driven organization training attendees to improve individual aspects of their lives by understanding how those aspects fit into the larger whole. The logo itself embodies the ideas of integration and balance, and recalls the origins of those ideas, in eastern philosophy. We’re looking forward to seeing the new book when it comes out next spring!

By pairing complementary, vivid colors with natural motifs, we were able to design a system that is both distinct and approachable. Simple hang tags keep production costs to a minimum while building a comprehensive brand identity. And the logo itself features organic letterforms combined with a clever mark, that comprises a leaf and cross, to symbolize the natural remedy kits within.

The client has been bowled over by the design and looks forward to rolling out the product in the coming months. We are in the process of completing the project with a new Web site for the firm, due to launch in Spring 2009. We’ll keep you posted!

As soon as the cards arrived, Springboard Forward’s spokesperson Jerri Jensen sent this wonderful email, “Our business cards and letterhead just arrived. This stuff is AMAZING. These cards are so much better than I imagined. I’m so glad you have continued to push us into the “fundamentally different” territory in line with our strategic positioning. Thank you so much for all you’re doing for this organization.”

It’s great to hear such glowing feedback for such a humble piece of marketing material. But it proves that an organization’s brand strategy can, and should, be delivered at every touchpoint.

• Read more about the re-branding project
• Check out some of our other nonprofit work

This exciting project builds on our ongoing program of work for the Cancer Center and gives us an opportunity to develop and strengthen the brand further.

• Download a PDF of some of our recent SCC work

Astia Venture Conferences Promo from Iron Creative on Vimeo.

As a resource for fast-growing, women-led enterprises, Astia has built a network of advisors and VC’s like no other. And while their offering is truly exceptional, they were having trouble articulating it in a hip, cool way that matched their organization’s culture. So with the “It Conference” (their annual showcase) around the corner, they established a partnership with Iron. The goal? Tighten the core Astia message and build a sub-brand around the conference. Oh, and do it in two weeks.

Luckily, we don’t believe in spending months and months toiling over a strategic positioning. Why? Because Iron is an agency run by Creative Directors. We’ve spent our lives winning awards for successfully framing offerings in terms that connect and grab peoples’ imagination. So as we dig into a company’s inner workings, we recognize the building blocks for that process at a speed no left-brained type can.

Suffice to say, ten days later, Astia had a slick new identity for the conference, along with the language they’d need to more effectively sell the conference (and Astia as a whole) to their myriad targets.

• Breaking News: check out the it conference viral email

The ‘addition’ symbol in the logo alludes to the company’s position which we determined during an extensive strategic process carried out earlier this year. Essentially, Paine & Partners’ unique approach allows the firm to identify opportunities other firms do not or cannot see. And it is this hidden component that is artfully reflected in the logo, while the ‘addition’ symbol alludes to added value.