Brand strategy · Brand design · Fractional creative direction
Most agencies brand on one person's taste. The better ones have a process for getting people excited about ideas that may or may not work. We treat branding as a communication engineering problem. Collect the right data, understand it properly, and design stops being a matter of opinion. It becomes alignment and it starts hitting the outcome it was built for.
Everything below runs on the same brand data, collected once at the start. Not a mood board and not somebody's opinion. Measured, and yours to keep.
A real one, with real data.
Square One puts 21 questions to everyone with veto power, answered alone. Constellations puts your brand in front of a live audience of your buyers. You get a report on what your leadership believes, what your market sees, and exactly where the two disagree. That gap is the audit.
Built on the audit, not beside it.
Positioning, messaging and creative direction that trace back to a number. Then we load it all into an AI system trained on your brand data and nothing else, so every decision after this one starts from evidence your competitors don't have.
Data-driven, AI-enabled, built to enterprise standards.
Identity, websites, campaigns, video and social, built from the strategy and produced with AI tools running on your brand data. Automation for everything that should be automatic. And the sites are engineered for security and performance at the level enterprise IT audits, because ours get audited.
A professor in the seat.
Joe taught design at the college and graduate level for sixteen years. He takes the creative director seat part-time, trains your team on the data, puts it in the tools they already use, and gets more out of the people you have than a new hire would. When there is build work, the DarkSquare team turns on.
The same data, read four ways. Start where you need to.
Four in depth, five more in brief. Every one began with the data and ended with something the client could run without us.
01Capital construction software
Brand refresh across web, social, video, print and a style guide that holds. Twenty-two stakeholders, one direction, no revision rounds after launch. Departments we never touched asked to be updated, down to the IT portal.
We didn’t keep revisiting the direction like you often do. DarkSquare gave us a clear starting point, and the whole team moved forward together.
DarkSquare brought a rare level of thoughtfulness to how our brand shows up across the business. The work is always of extremely high quality and cohesion without requiring a lot of input or direction.
02Scholarship nonprofit, Bay Area
A privately funded nonprofit paying partial tuition for low-income families needed an identity as diverse as the families it serves. One child illustration couldn’t do it, so we drew eight. The stationery was printed one child per set and shuffled. The website draws a different one on every page load.
I am a critic of creative firms and their approaches. They often reflect great creativity but not so great connection to the business and real world. DarkSquare is an exception.
It was important that our new brand honored the diversity of the families we work with. Their sensitivity and imaginative approach helped us do that in a powerful and sincere way we never would have thought of.
03Bioartist and futurist
Amy Karle’s work is shown in museums around the world and has been recognized by the Smithsonian and the United Nations. The site had to carry both the depth and the breadth of it without flattening either. We planned it as an extension of the brand, then built it to hold the immersive narrative her work creates.
As an artist and designer myself I have an extra critical eye, and DarkSquare surpassed my expectations.
04Automated decisioning
Twenty years in automated decisioning and two acquisitions had outgrown the old identity. Discovery workshops with leadership and interviews with their biggest national and international customers set the archetype and the positioning. Siloed sub-brands came together under one mark. Then we designed Alfie, the owl that fronts their AI assistant.
The outcome of InRule’s brand evolution initiative is a modern look and feel that reflects who we are and our vision for the future.
I am a critic of creative firms and their approaches. I've seen quite a few and they often reflect great creativity but not so great connection to the business and real world. DarkSquare is an exception. The brand they created for us was very well done.
We didn't keep revisiting the direction like you often do. DarkSquare gave us a clear starting point, and the whole team moved forward together.
We really appreciated DarkSquare's efforts and guidance in helping us define our brand archetype. The outcome of InRule's brand evolution initiative is a modern look and feel that reflects who we are and our vision for the future.
DarkSquare's comprehensive approach to creating our security campaign was outstanding. They gathered surveys from cross-functional stakeholders and combined it with their own research, to present archetypes and recommended messaging and creative direction. Their expertise and innovative methods have made them an invaluable partner in achieving our campaign goals and have garnered praise from across our organization.
DarkSquare has helped us better understand who we are as a company and how to communicate the value we provide. They are a valuable partner to us in navigating how to talk about our offerings in the very technical and rapidly changing markets that we operate in.
DarkSquare brought a rare level of thoughtfulness to how our brand shows up across the business. That consistency and intentionality across different facets has been invaluable.
DarkSquare has a great process that helped us answer critical questions about how we represent ourselves through our brand. They helped us better understand our messaging and how to reach our audience. Our new brand is something we're really proud of.
As an experienced web developer who has worked with many creative agencies, I've been wholly impressed with DarkSquare's high quality of design, delivery and technical execution.
We were ultimately blown away by the final design of Alfie. He is everything we hoped for and perfectly embodies the spirit of our Generative AI offering. DarkSquare's creativity and expertise helped us create a brand character that will truly resonate with our customers.
DarkSquare helped us create a brand that spoke clearly our values to the communities we serve, the donors who partner with us, our board of professionals, and our own internal team. It was important that our new brand honored the diversity of the families we work with and the area we operate in. Their sensitivity and imaginative approach helped us do that in a powerful and sincere way we never would have thought of.
DarkSquare has created a new brand and logo that are bold and stylish, and that recognizes the two company founders in a creative and meaningful way.
DarkSquare helped us imagine what our brand could be and walked us through a process to realize its full potential. Their understanding of the brand's position opportunities and how the brand should inform the user experience of the product was a tremendous help as we built our business. We really benefited from their applied theory approach and experience.
DarkSquare helped us tie our brand with the theme of the CCW event in a powerful way. Their design work and creative ideas made us a hit at the conference and the memorable take home ideas they helped us with will keep attendees thinking about us.
DarkSquare took the time to thoroughly understand the concepts and vision for my brand, and present it in a high-end contemporary website that a wide audience could understand. As an artist and designer myself I have an extra critical eye, and DarkSquare surpassed my expectations. The team has undeniably impressive talent and is a pleasure to work with.
Joseph knew Mike personally and supported his website and public presence for more than ten years.
Most creative directors are the last line of defense for their own work. They have trained taste and the authority to defend it, and when a stakeholder pushes back, the answer is some version of trust me. That is a reasonable way to run a design studio and a bad way to settle a decision six people have to live with.
Communication has math under it. Not hard math, but enough to state what you believe, put it in front of the people you're trying to reach, and hand the room something to argue with. Every agency says it's data-driven. Ask them what their assumptions were before the data came back, and how many turned out to be wrong.
The data doesn't stop at the strategy deck. It trains your designers. It gets loaded into the AI tools your team already uses, so what they produce all day is on brand without anyone standing over it.
Creative direction is an engineering problem.
Everyone with veto power answers 21 questions about the business. Alone, not in a workshop, because a room converges on whoever talks first. You get a 50 to 70 page report on what your own leadership believes, which is usually the first time anyone has read it back to them.
Our assumptions go in front of a live audience of your buyers as a range of ideas and elements, not finished directions. The direction emerges from what comes back. Results in under 48 hours.
Joe takes the creative director seat part-time. Weekly with your team, every other week with leadership. Your designers get trained on the data, and your AI tools get loaded with it. When there's build work, the DarkSquare team turns on. When there isn't, it turns off and you keep the director.
We don't skip that order. We tried it once, and the year it cost was not worth the six weeks it saved.
I taught design at the college and graduate level for sixteen years. Branding, typography, design theory, and every semester, whether a student could explain their work to someone who wasn't a designer. I've run DarkSquare since 2002, and I built Constellations because I got tired of defending directions with taste.
I'll show you the evidence before I ask you to agree with me.
DarkSquare did the brand and positioning work at seven companies that were later acquired, by Cisco, eBay and Blackstone-backed Sphera among them.
One rebrand, one direction, zero revision rounds after launch.
Reported by that same client in the year after the rebrand.
Stock-photo search time removed from one fractional client.
ViptelaCisco2017SatmetrixNICE2017
SalesPredicteBay2016InsideViewDemandbase2021ICIXRiskonnect (Thoma Bravo)2021
Linkage DesignMechdyne2022SupplyShiftSphera (Blackstone)2024Brand work contributes to an outcome like an acquisition. It doesn't cause one, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling.
Read the seven exits ›It works when
You have a marketing leader, at least one designer or videographer on staff, and nobody in between them. Usually 500 employees and up, in enterprise B2B technology. Usually right after an acquisition, or in front of something big enough that getting it wrong would be expensive.
It doesn't when
The people who can kill the work won't sit in the kickoff. We've stopped taking those. If your CEO is planning to see this for the first time at the end and react to it, we'd both be spending a year to find that out.
How buying this works
Every engagement starts here. Priced for five stakeholders or fewer, rising with the number of people who hold veto power. The report is yours whether or not we work together afterward.
A full-time creative director at a company your size averages $165,613 a year before benefits, recruiting and onboarding. The loaded first-year number is closer to $200,000.
Identity, messaging, the site, campaigns, video. Only when you want it, and only after the direction has been tested.
One call and we'll tell you if this isn't a fit. We'd rather lose the project than the year.
