Innervoice is an all-inclusive creative production studio in Auburn, California that provides value-driven media resources and solutions for independent creatives and producers, helping them feel creatively empowered in a holistic and creatively-nuturing environment.
To position Innervoice within the right market, help them understand and communicate with their audience, and differentiate them from their competition.
Discover everything relevant to the business, customers, and market. Then highlight the traits that set them apart from their competitors, through highly-aligned messaging, visual identity elements, and other customized communication tactics that resonate with their target audience.
By asking lots of direct, focused questions, we discovered common threads and connections between personal needs, company values, and long-term desires. We then distilled that information into simple attributes that stand as cornerstones for the company ethos. While all are relevant, Creative is the primary attribute.
Next, we researched Innervoice’s audience. While we identified a number of potential customer types, these are the three users most on target. With this understanding, clarity and cohesiveness could be achieved through specific messaging and design.
Rent and real estate is expensive in San Francisco, so Dave looks outside of his home city for a space that offers the space, equipment, and flexible hours needed to complete professional and personal projects; without long-term agreements or large rental fees.
Betty’s passion is documentary film making. But having the tools to make it happen, isn’t easy on a small budget. So she needs a holistic, creative space that offers pro equipment and project support to develop her project the way she envisions, on her schedule and budget.
The music is locked in. The mission, clear. Issac seeks an all-inclusive studio to record, publish, and market his music on his terms. As a one-man business, he also needs a facility that has flexible in-house hours and remote online access, in order to accommodate his ever-changing schedule as a professional, touring musician.
After a thorough discovery, we used our findings to develop the visual style preferences of Innervoice’s target customers–color, texture, logos, type styles, photography, and messages were composed using found art and original design concepts to choose the most appropriate direction. These layouts are strictly for in-house decision-making and never used for public consumption.
Once the overall style was locked in, concepting of the logo could begin. Inspiration was drawn not only from the business attributes and customer stylescapes, but also from the vast amount of audio/visual equipment owned by Innervoice—cameras, mixing boards, instruments, cables, amps, etc. all became key elements of the final logo form, reinforcing Innervoice’s style and focus.
A simpler form of the main logo that can be used in spaces too small to easily read the main logo, such as social media profile pics and avatars.
The dashes are representative of a camera lens and various degrees of visual and audio settings, as well as the numerous, individual features offered by Innervoice.
This color palette was chosen to reflect simplicity, unity, and positive energy.
Headlines, subheads, and pullquotes are set in different weights and styles of the same san serif type family, Bai Jamjuree—an evenly-weighted Google typeface that works in both print and digital platforms, creating cohesiveness with the logo design. All body copy uses various weights and styles of Archivo–another san serif Google font, that is crisp, clean, and compatible with the heading font.
The character shapes are balanced and evenly-weighted, which also helped inspire the logo design.
During the Discovery phase of this project, we became aware of the many opportunities Innervoice offers its clients. Typically, having too many features can dilute the message and strengths of the business. But in this case, it only helped to solidify it’s true mission.
Because of all these features, we envisioned a “wonderland” of opportunities; a magic place where creative ideas are embraced, experimented on, nurtured, and brought to life. So we combined the idea of a magic kingdom and a scientific lab, and created the name, “Creative WonderLab”.
Innervoice is as much a visual studio as it is a sound studio, so imagery plays an especially important role in conveying the look and feel they seek. And because photography is one of their specialties, they had the ability to shoot their own photos, based on our Discovery findings, then allowed us to use them where appropriate.
Various abstract shapes are used to break up content, add interest to layouts, and call attention to specific points. An energetic trio of colored and dashed lines represent sound level meters, dials, and switches. They’re also used on interior walls throughout the WonderLab.
We began the website build by focusing on the target customers usability needs and how they would be accessing Innervoice’s content. Their choices were overwhelmingly mobile vs home computer, so the site was built to be responsive and scale content proportionately for all current mobile devices and web browsers. Then we focused on the most relevant content, and organized it order of importance.
“The WonderLab really lives up to its name. I was able to record a single and get behind the scenes footage for my own documentary, in one place! And the staff was very helpful and inspiring!”
