Travertine Strategies

Brand and ID

Allison Handler has worked in the nonprofit and public sectors as staff, executive director, board leader and consultant for two decades. A former land use planner in Missoula, Montana, and affordable housing developer in Missoula and in Portland, Oregon, she has consulted with nonprofits and governments nationwide, with an emphasis on organizations working toward a healthy built and natural environment. Her practice focuses on strategy development, governance, and fundraising. 
 
She launched Travertine Strategies in 2019 to help organizations get a clear focus of the impact they want to have, set their strategy to get there, and assemble the organizational building blocks needed for success.
Logo and brand development
Patrick and I met with Allison virtually, to learn about her consulting work and the kind of clients she works with. We collaboratively identified attributes of her clients, and the ideal types of clients she'd like to work with most. Using a framework of brand-focused exercises, we held three collaborative, online whiteboard discovery work sessions, asking strategic, design-thinking questions. Her responses led to the development an internal-facing brand statement, serving to guide our design decisions.
 
The Creative Brief
Once we gathered details about Allison's work, her clients (demographics and psychographics), and their journeys, we developed a guiding creative brief. The document synthesized the important details we learned in our meetings with Allison.
 
Logo Design
As we explored design ideas in greyscale, questions surfaced: Do we also describe what she does? Do we also describe who she does this work for? We explored all ideas, arrived at several, refined them, and chose three candidates that best fit the attributes in the guiding brief. Allison chose the design exploration we named "practical thinker."
 
Our next step was to explore her chosen design in the stylescape's color palette she chose. The stylescapes were developed from her brand attributes, while keeping her
audience in mind.
Business Card Design
Once the logo design was approved, business card layouts were explored and presented. One design was selected, copy was updated to reflect her new business contact information, and final art was prepared for print production.