Gerardy Photography (GP) is a school portrait company that photographs preschool through high school-aged children. Their brand values are relationship, quality, value, innovation, and memory, with a focus on fostering relationships with schools and parents, high-quality products and services, and a friendly business demeanor.
The company began over 30 years ago, photographing preschool and elementary-aged children. Their original brand identity reflected a very young customer base, and traditional studio portraiture. Over time, as GP expanded to include older children in middle and high school, and incorporate more contemporary portraiture, their brand had become outdated, and no longer aligned with their customer base. They needed a refresh.
I was tasked with updating the brand to reflect a wider customer base, and modernizing their identity, with the following goals in mind:
1. Elevate the visual identity into a contemporary style without losing the essence of their long-established brand.
2. Appeal to a wider customer base that would include preschool through high school children, and their parents and schools.
3. Emphasize core values, and visually communicate competency and camaraderie.
Updating The Logo
The old logo was a small, raster image, with an outdated, heavily embossed style. I vectorized the logo to enable clean enlargement, and flattened it for style and versatility. I also deepened the original shade of cobalt blue to increase a sense of stability and trustworthiness, and to give it a more “grown-up” feel. I used a lighter, brighter shade of blue for the word “photography” to give the logo some dimension, and add a bit of warmth back in.
I applied the same techniques to their apple icon, by vectorizing, flattening, and updating the colors to add dimension.
raster to vector conversion
Updating The Style
The old GP style consisted of dark backgrounds (typically traditional photo backdrops), bright rainbow gradients for text, flat images of photographs, and heavy embossing with large drop shadows.
To modernize the style, I flattened out the embossing, toned down the colors, and brightened the overall look by using white backgrounds with colored headers and footers. To bring the brand to life, I utilized high key photos against the white background to emulate a real life, three-dimensional look. This invokes a feeling of warmth and connection, while still highlighting the company's photographic abilities . I also added hand-drawn elements and a handwritten font to give the look a friendly personality, and keep it from looking too generic or corporate.
Updating the Color Palette
Primary colors and rainbow gradients had been a staple in the original GP brand identity, as these colors are historically representative of young children. With respect to the original intent, I kept the primary colors, but toned down the rainbow by limiting the color range and deepening the tones, to give the color palette a more sophisticated feel that would work for a wider range of ages. I also used color psychology to define the main company colors.
Blue was the original color for the logo, and was fitting for GP’s main color, as it symbolizes competence and trustworthiness.
Yellow was chosen as a secondary color because it symbolizes sincerity and friendliness. It is also complementary to blue, and provides excellent contrast.
Orange was chosen as an accent color because it symbolizes innovation and excitement. It is also a color that entices people to act, and works well as a call-to-action color.
Other Visual Elements
A handwritten font was chosen to reinforce the friendly personality of GP. I chose this particular font because it is clean and legible, without appearing too childish, and pairs well with simple sans serif paragraph fonts.
New visual elements included icons for key photographic services, and an updated apple icon and pattern.
Brand Consistency
The final step was to ensure brand consistency by applying the new visual identity across all company materials including brand collateral, packaging, sales materials, picture day flyers, order forms, emails, web graphics, and more. A handful of graphics were made for internal branding purposes, to reinforce the company promises and values in the workplace.
I also created a new sales brochure to go with the new identity. The purpose was to give a brief overview of the company products and services, through the lens of the company values, in order to pique the interest of potential customers. The style was intended to be highly visual and image-heavy, to grab the reader's attention, and display the company's offerings and personality. The result was a visual representation of what Gerardy Photography is all about.
