Frontier

Background

After a decade in business, rapid expansion followed by strategic contraction and divestiture, and an ownership and leadership change, the Richmond-based consulting firm The Frontier Project was ready for its next chapter. No longer in "startup" mode and with a deliberate effort to excise work we weren't truly expert in, the business no longer felt like an experiment or "project" but rather a collective of experienced guides helping companies push into the unknown.

A wilderness scene with evergreen trees, a glassy river, and gray mountains in clouds in the distance

Challenge

One of our perpetual challenges: it’s hard to describe what Frontier does. Every company’s challenges and our solutions to address them are highly unique. We sell our creative approach, not off-the-shelf products.

Meanwhile, the last couple of decades in corporate communications have meant every deck, every one-pager is expected to have charts, colors, icons, and other means of data visualization to ostensibly aid in comprehension (but in actuality to keep people from getting bored). We attempted to keep our comms both academic and friendly—illustrating broad corporate concepts such as collaboration or influence with simple iconography and stock photography. But the results always felt hackneyed, imprecise, and dumbed-down with certain stock photo models faces everywhere we looked.

Example of bad corporate stock photography

Opportunity

The leadership and ownership shift made it time to take a different tack with the Frontier brand. With a new logo developed in collaboration with Palindrome Creative, our first brand activation was the website. As the original architect of the last Frontier web refresh and creator of our digital newsletters, I decided to take a lesson from our web and email metrics that showed that highly designed and visually appealing comms got the least engagement. The new website was an opportunity to stay authentic to ourselves and our business and sell ourselves the old-fashioned way: with audience focus and great stories.

Brand Theme: Do Work You Believe In

With a small, close-knit, highly articulate internal team (who was also highly over-scheduled) we decided to take on the work of developing our brand platform and do it on the fly. As a covid pandemic project highly influenced by our watching of Ted Lasso, we found ourselves revolving around the concept of belief. Belief that things—and you—can change. Belief that the work you do is important. Belief in the essential dignity of your coworkers. Belief that your vision for the future is achievable.

New Logo and Monogram

I developed an internal brand discovery through surveys and interviews to determine what direction that new brand would take. It became clear that iconography had fallen out of favor and that pursuing a name-first approach was desired to reinforce the name evolution. We then brought in Palindrome Creative to do the visual exploration. A bespoke but streamlined monogram and sophisticated wordmark echoed the company's new identity around custom, high-touch solutions.

Color

Our new owner and CEO knew from the beginning that he wanted the main brand color to be green. With the hard work of determining a palette anchor already done (phew!), the remaining colors would round out the visual representation of the human ecosystem, the concept that underlies the company’s raison d’etre. A grounded, nature-based palette would emit an air of reliability, constancy, and optimism.

Messages

Consulting on corporate culture requires a certain amount of privacy and security with respect to clients’ internal workings. So instead of relying on case studies and attributable statements, which are hard to come by, we framed scenarios companies might face and the way we approach challenges, rather than specific problems with prescribed fixes. And instead of trying to precisely articulate what our company does, we adopted the conversational way our people used to describe our work in person.

The four pillars of the Frontier approach

Screenshots of the frontier website on mobile

What We Learned Along the Way

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