Cannon Design is an integrated architecture and design firm that approached us to help them redefine the brand messaging to better convey their desire to help people and communities flourish through game-changing design.
Through a series of internal workshops, market research and benchmarking we developed Living Centered Design at Cannon Design.
Living-Centered Design
Defining the fourth paradigm of architecture.
CannonDesign is not just an architecture and engineering firm — they are an innovation firm. It isn’t always easy to see that though…
In order to reposition their brand and define a stronger core messaging strategy for the firm’s future we needed to develop:
A new brand foundation: A unifying guide for achieving CannonDesign's mission
A new purpose: Why CannonDesign exists
Brand pillars: What differentiates CannonDesign
Maxims: Guidelines for inspiring behaviors and powering the mission.
Brand Foundation
To begin redefining the brand we needed to dive into who, what and how a new brand foundation would redefine the CannonDesign ecosystem.
How we uncovered the foundation:
01
Understand
External Context
02
Understand
Brand Context
04
Anticipate
the Future
03
Understand
the Audience
01 Understand External Context
In the world of architecture there are three historically defined eras — the Era of Style, Era of Master Builder and Era of Marketplace Expertise. We saw this effort to create a new brand foundation as an opportunity to tap into and define the 4th paradigm of architecture.
What does it mean for CannonDesign and for their clients to be a comprehensive design firm in the 21st century?
02 Understand Brand Context
By completing a comprehensive audit of CannonDesign brand resources — brand positioning decks, the company website, social media, proposals and competitor benchmarks — we discovered that the brand was lacking key features that we needed to define.
03 Understand the Audience
We first defined four roles that inhibit the CannonDesign ecosystem and started to look at how a new brand could better support each role in their respective space.
04 Anticipate the future
We workshopped how CannonDesign defines their strengths and where they see these strengths delivering the maximum benefit.
We bring together intelligence, intuition, and include all perspectives to create something enduring and impact lives.
The Approach
We harness Living-Centered Design for
every client to transform their business and
the impact they make on the world.
Building off of the design centric belief of “Human Centered Design” we developed “Living Centered Design” to convey CannonDesigns impact beyond the physical structures they design.
These physical spaces facilitate all of life’s experiences and extend beyond the human lifetime. CannonDesign’s work is exceptionally thoughtful.
A complete Brand Foundation
We filled in all of the gaps of the CannonDesign brand defining their purpose, belief, approach, brand pillars and a set of maxim to internally live by,
Deliverables
With the Brand Foundation complete we moved to design to help us tell the story.
Maxim Booklet
To socialize CannonDesigns new internal rules to live by, or Maxims, we designed a pocket size booklet that was distributed to all employees at the Living Centered Design launch.
Messaging Strategy Playbook
To supplement existing brand positioning decks we designed a comprehensive guide to develop and tailor messaging for every CannonDesign audience across all experience touch-points.
Specs.
ROLES
1 Account Manager
1 Architect
1 Content Strategist
1 Design Researcher
1 Graphic Designer (Me)
TOOLS
Figma
InDesign
Keynote