When it comes to branding yourself, you can be your own worst client, especially when you’re a company full of talented creatives. Early in my career, I was tasked with refreshing T3’s brand and website. After a grueling experience (to put it lightly), I vowed to myself that I would never do it again. Well, never say never. 5 years later I was asked to do it again, but this time I had the experience and skills to drive the brand in a direction that still stands strong and gives T3 a system that simply works. Please go visit the live site to get the full experience.
There were two aspects of T3’s brand that I couldn’t touch: the logo and the red. So that’s where I started. One of the main design elements of the site and accompanying designs is the large swaths of color and the top right corner notch. You’ll notice that the home screen is in itself just one giant T3 logo. This was a nice way to give a little more substance to a logo that doesn’t really have any reasoning.
Beyond the site, the other major piece that needed that branding love was the agency presentation deck. If you’ve worked at an agency before, you will know how many decks get built on a daily basis and also how they become a Jackson Pollock of different fonts, colors and styles very quickly. With our T3 deck, I worked really hard at establishing rules and parameters, but also making the layouts and design elements flexible enough to work for anybody. The simplicity of the brand design has a lot to do with why this has been working so well. People have really adopted it, and it is so awesome to see that the brand holds up in decks like this, even when a lot of the work inside the deck is, itself, branding.
This flexibility in design has shown itself in many other parts of the agency as well. Whether it’s on the giant screens in the main lobby, or speaking for the dogs of T3 in our holiday calendar. This was a project that would have been really easy to pass on, based on previous experiences, but i’m so glad that I didn’t.