BGCA Cause Brand Development
The Club Door as a Symbol for a Facilities-based Organization
The Club Door as a Symbol for a Facilities-based Organization
TEAM: Creative, Marketing
RESPONSIBILITIES: Creative direction, vendor relationship management, project management
The Blue Door, in a nutshell, is why BGCA hired me in the first place. When I first started, the Creative team had been "in the process" of developing an icon to represent the Movement. After over 2 years of internal debate between the Creative team, the Marketing leadership team and the Board, reviewing several dozen options for the icon, including detailed iterations of each option, the organization had finally settled on the Blue Door as an appropriate symbol for the organization, intended for use much the same way Komen uses the pink ribbon to badge almost everything they put out.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Creative direction, vendor relationship management, project management
The Blue Door, in a nutshell, is why BGCA hired me in the first place. When I first started, the Creative team had been "in the process" of developing an icon to represent the Movement. After over 2 years of internal debate between the Creative team, the Marketing leadership team and the Board, reviewing several dozen options for the icon, including detailed iterations of each option, the organization had finally settled on the Blue Door as an appropriate symbol for the organization, intended for use much the same way Komen uses the pink ribbon to badge almost everything they put out.
What you see above is the original version of the Club Door, which the Creative Director and I cobbled together from some stock photography, some brand-owned photography, and lots of fine-tuning in Photoshop. As you'll notice, we were using the same perspective on the door both with and without a Club kid in the threshold. For cause-related executions, having a kid in the door was fast becoming part of our visual formula. On the other hand, for non-cause-related executions, sometimes it simply didn't make sense to use a kid in front of the door.
After about 6 months of using these rough versions of the Club Door in corporate partner pitches and presentations, cause marketing proposals and promotions, including a handful of live executions, some of which revealed the limitations of the above artwork, it was time to develop the final assets we'd be able to use for any application of the Club Door, from icons and signoffs to out of home for years to come.
After about 6 months of using these rough versions of the Club Door in corporate partner pitches and presentations, cause marketing proposals and promotions, including a handful of live executions, some of which revealed the limitations of the above artwork, it was time to develop the final assets we'd be able to use for any application of the Club Door, from icons and signoffs to out of home for years to come.
Above is the final "cause" version of the door we developed. Once the decision-making bodies at BGCA were finally ready to have Creative develop the 'final' iteration of the Club Door icon, it was up to us to figure out how to get it done. The Creative Director and a Senior Designer were ready to pull together a massive photoshoot, including having a version of the door built to scale, hiring talent, etc. etc. As we roughed out a budget for the shoot, it became apparent to me that straight photography was not the best path for us to take. At this point, I suggested to the CD and Designer that we should explore having the door rendered digitally, and I began investigating studios who could render it for us, as well as the costs and process for doing so.
I put together a short list of local digital production houses, and shared their portfolios & reels with the team. It ended up being the easiest decision: local shop Indigo Studios blew us away with their capabilities, the team was easy to work with, and we even managed to work out a really great deal on the budget. I can't tell you how nervous I was, thinking that somehow MY recommendation to my team would backfire and there'd be no one to blame but myself. As it turns out, I had no reason to be nervous. The consummate professionals at Indigo helped us through the process of developing the CAD designs for the door, including exactly how deep the panels on the door would be, how many bevels showed up on the door frame, the design of the door handle, and so on. What we ended up with was a couple of ultra high resolution renderings that would fulfill our creative needs for the foreseeable future, and the flexibility to go back to Indigo for any specific views or tweaks we might require in the future, all for about the same as what we'd have spent on a single massive photoshoot. It was quite a fantastic feeling, having my boss trust me to make the recommendation to go with digital rendering, to choose the studio, to manage the budget and the vendor relationship, and then to have the end results be so well received across our entire organization.
I put together a short list of local digital production houses, and shared their portfolios & reels with the team. It ended up being the easiest decision: local shop Indigo Studios blew us away with their capabilities, the team was easy to work with, and we even managed to work out a really great deal on the budget. I can't tell you how nervous I was, thinking that somehow MY recommendation to my team would backfire and there'd be no one to blame but myself. As it turns out, I had no reason to be nervous. The consummate professionals at Indigo helped us through the process of developing the CAD designs for the door, including exactly how deep the panels on the door would be, how many bevels showed up on the door frame, the design of the door handle, and so on. What we ended up with was a couple of ultra high resolution renderings that would fulfill our creative needs for the foreseeable future, and the flexibility to go back to Indigo for any specific views or tweaks we might require in the future, all for about the same as what we'd have spent on a single massive photoshoot. It was quite a fantastic feeling, having my boss trust me to make the recommendation to go with digital rendering, to choose the studio, to manage the budget and the vendor relationship, and then to have the end results be so well received across our entire organization.
These two images of the door, shown above and below, represent the view of the door we decided upon for "non-cause" related executions. The perspective is more skewed than the version we use with a Club kid. With a human form by the door, a more frontal view looks more natural and spatially accurate. In executions where the door doesn't have to comfortable co-exist with a Club kid, this more 3/4 type view enhances the architectural detail of the door, provides a clear view INSIDE the door, and it's slight vertical distortion lends it a more monumental feel. Of course, we performed additional tweaks to the renderings Indigo provided, including augmenting highlights and shadows, and adding the light spilling out of the door to heighten the drama.
While we were at it, we developed a direct frontal view of the door where the view of the logo on the door is entirely unaffected by the play of light/shadow or perspective. So far, this door has only been used in very specific circumstances where the viewer has already been introduced to an OPEN door, so that the closed door serves to bookend the communication piece.
About a month after Indigo delivered the static renderings shown above, we had received such resounding approval of these new assets, we managed to scrape together a small budget to have Indigo develop a quick animated bumper using the door which we proceeded to use as a lead-in on several high value video projects. Below you'll see the bumper used to set up an interview of mega-celeb and longtime BGCA spokesperson Denzel Washington. This bumper is yet another flexible asset our organization will be able to use for years to come to add polish to our multimedia projects.
Once we had a door that National had used enough to learn what works and what doesn't, it was time to figure out how to share this fantastic new asset with our 4,000 local Clubs. Ever since they were introduced to the Club Door concept at the 2011 National Conference, they had been clamoring for some assets they could use. These graphic standards were developed to show local Clubs how to use this new asset and made available on marketing.bgca.org.
