Banner Day

Branding, Guidelines, Web
2021

Banner Day is a branding agency that takes a words-first approach to brand creation: focusing on helping organizations translate their businesses into brands with meaning through defining and refining effective naming, messaging, and strategy.

I designed the visual identity — from the core assets of the logo to the graphic treatments of the brand’s sunburst as an asterisk, the letter confetti, and the “wordscape” illustrations — to highlight the unique language-inspired nature of the agency, wrapped in a warm and optimistic color palette meant to make the process of branding feel like the delightful work that it can be when done well. I then translated the identity across a full suite of collateral, brand guidelines, and the website.

Banner Day ↗

A diagram of the parts of Banner Day's logo
A colorful grid of nine color theme options for Banner Day's icon

The icon is designed to be an abstract speech bubble — emphasizing messaging — that has a tail like a banner waving off to the left. In the center of the speech bubble is a custom, sunburst-asterisk mark. The wordmark features a customized “B” and “D” that echoes the same banner tail shape, and a unique “y” at the end with a descender that waves like a flag as well.

The Sunburst-Asterisk

Lifted from the center of our icon, the sunburst becomes a versatile device that helps to organize information across applications. The sunburst replaces the default versions as our custom asterisk in all cases; match both color and scale to the accompanying type,

Letter Confetti

An alphabet soup of organically-yet-orderly arranged capital letters and em dashes act as patterns and marginalia in the designs to further emphasize the messaging-centric nature of the words-first branding work.

Wordscapes

Wordscapes create a small, narrative moment or scene by combining: an organic arrangement of text (from a public domain literary piece with a subject matter that relates to the scene at hand) which forms the background or environment; and a single, hand-drawn illustration which acts as the subject or focus. The wordscape needn't be legible, but creates custom artwork that deepens the message of the surrounding branded communication.

Brand guidelines pages showing the logo diagram and nine color themes for the logo
Brand guidelines pages showing the tagline "For brands worth celebrating"
Web design on a large monitor shows letter confetti floating around the main content
Mobile device shows the website menu design and a laptop is open to the library page
Monitor with the Keynote and Powerpoint template design showing the Thank You page
LinkedIn's company profile page design shows a custom banner and the brand icon
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