Platinum’s Bright Idea
If there is one thing certain about this year’s HOF, it’s that everything was branded to perfection. From popsockets to food vouchers, to skateboards. It was pretty easy to tell HoF9 was here, and here to stay! But who is responsible for all this work? We were able to interview Traci Burchard, Art Director from Platinum Creative to get the inside scoop behind brand creation of HoF9.
"how much teamwork went into this project from every member of the team"
Burchard was responsible for branding and designing HoF9, but she explained that it was a collaboration with the creative team. Craig Daily, the Creative Director of Platinum Creative, Todd Kinley, Justin Connors, and Stephanie Rizzo helped to provide constructive feedback during the design phase. She explained how much teamwork went into this project from every member of the team. “This year we did it a little differently” Burchard said, “Everyone on the design team had an opportunity to throw down a design for Hall of Fame 9 and then ultimately my logo type was chosen. The duo-tone style was from Daissy Linares. She came up with this duo-tone style where one side is their professional life and the other is their personal life.” From there the team worked to create the brand style guide for HoF9, and Burchard became the person to oversee and art direct the pieces moving into HoF.
It all started with a creative brief where Daily explained how he wanted this year’s theme to be about giving back. “It is about the alumni giving back to the students and students giving back to the alumni and the circle that happens," Burchard explained. And this came through when used in the design, "If you notice with the ‘NINE’ you don’t have the second ‘N’ without the ‘I’ and the ‘E’ coming together to help each other. Everyone took the logo style guide and built out the different event elements. There were a lot of iterations and everyone took on their own personal spin. I wanted to go clean, bold, loud, and fun.” They also worked to make sure that this year’s HoF would be a big contrast from next year’s who's planning has already started.
Burchard also explained the rationale behind using the word ‘NINE’ instead of a number ‘9’. “The past few years we used numbers so this year we decided to use the word,” Burchard said. Talking about choice of color palette Burchard said, “There were several inspirations behind it, we did a lot of research into color studies and what worked well together. I picked the yellow color because it’s so loud you can’t ignore it. It has so much energy it just brings fun to the pallet. The blue came naturally because it’s a great contrast. There were actually more secondary colors than ever before.” The choices allowed the team to run with a lot of different ideas and let them play off the palette while still having unique looks.
“There were a few fears going into the logistics of the branding. The biggest worry was the yellow. We work with a lot of printers to make physical prints and it has to work in not only CMYK but also RGB.” said Burchard. This meant that if done wrong, colors wouldn’t sync up correctly and things would look off. However, they were lucky, “I was pleasantly surprised when our swag came back and everything was just right! There was a printer that made the yellow look green so I had to work with the colors. That was the only place where we had to tweak things, everything else just naturally came out beautiful and bright.”
Overall, Platinum Creative outdid themselves on this year’s Hall of Fame design. Being able to capture feelings, and excitement with colors and logos does not just come with knowing technical aspects. They have to actually understand the audience (students in this case) and this proves how much they care and understand the students.
