SIGNAL WORKS ARCHITECTURE

Inspiring a culture that restores communities with architecture.

We worked with the founder to develop a brand strategy and identity that moved the firm beyond his name and personality to embed his vision and values into the organization’s culture and image.

challenge

Over the past decade, the founder had grown his architecture firm from a solo practice to a team of designers, project managers, and staff. Like many of his contemporaries, his firm bore his name. However, he wanted to leave a legacy that embodies the firm’s values rather than embellish his ego.

INSIGHTS

Updating an old brand cannot be successful without the passionate ownership of the renewed vision and identity by the staff. To successfully help the founder make this brand transition, we needed to involve the team in the rebranding process so that they had a personal stake in the vision.

OUTCOME

The design process ran much deeper than developing a brand identity – it challenged the founder to realign his business and management practices in order to truly live out the vision and promise of the brand.

“Giant Shoulders is a design agency that solves business problems. Their branding approach helped us realign our company by applying our brand to express our mission, consolidating our process, managing and leading our employees, and our external communications.”

Eric Army, Founder of Signal Works

01 / RENAMING

Creating a name that resonates from the inside out

Branding is personal. Choosing a name is even more so. We had to get it right. We did that by taking a few steps back and defined the brand’s core promise and values. By understanding who the brand is, we can match it with a name that not just sounds right, but feels right. We brought rigor and process to help the founder focus and find the precise words for a name that reflected his vision, promise, and values.

02 / BRAND STRATEGY

Being different is easy, staying different is a lot harder

We measure success by how passionately our clients come to own their brands, but ownership can only be developed over time. To help the process, we developed a brand-culture playbook for Signal Works that guides everyone toward on-brand decisions regardless of their role and position.

Using our Brand Action System, we developed this playbook as the foundation for a 12-month change process. This comprehensive guide helped the team realign their business goals and management practices so they can truly live out the Signal Works vision and promise.

03 / BRAND IDENTITY DESIGN

Looking different helps make the point that you are different

Signal Works is a company driven by values and not by personalities, and they want to be known for how they empower clients and employees to renew neighborhoods with excellence. They are not like most architecture firms but simply saying that isn’t enough. This has to be shown in everything they do, starting with their website.

Our goal for the Signal Works website was to put their vision and values front and center. We see the website as a calling card to attract potential partners who share aligned values and an interest in neighborhood renewal. The goal is to differentiate them from the competition and multiply the good they can do in the world.