Hugo house branding and visual identity development
Art Direction, graphic design, web design, copywriting
Hugo House is a non-profit organization located in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. It focuses on supporting writers of all levels, as well as serving as a literary destination for the greater Seattle community. This project involved building a new identity for Hugo House that more effectively embodied the organization’s mission, and that refreshed and elevated the brand without losing all semblance of the analog nature of writing.
Brand concept statement:
When a person reads a finished piece of writing, what they experience is polished, refined and concise. Yet the writing process itself is none of those things. It is messy, chaotic, and even infuriating. It involves torn out pages, crossed out sentences, and sometimes even scrapping everything and starting over. Usually, writing is a slow and laborious exercise in taking massive amounts of information—thoughts, ideas, anecdotes, observations—and sifting through it all until a narrative begins to emerge.
This process not only has the potential to present the world with a story it has never been told before, but it also has the power to show the writer something about themself that they perhaps did not see or fully understand at the beginning of their writing journey.
The visual concept for the Hugo House brand seeks to capture both sides of writing; the clean and contained final product, as well as the messiness of what preceded it.
This project began with extensive research on the history of Hugo House, the services they provide to writers, how they see themselves as an organization, and how they are viewed by the broader Seattle community. After examining the many sides of Hugo House’s identity, all of the information was condensed into three guiding words:
Focus
Engagement
Support
Based on these words, I explored all of the possible visuals to accurately capture each of the three brand pillars. From there, I formed a revised brand logo, and built the remainder of my brand visual explorations on this foundation.
In addition to a new logo, brand colors, typography and website, I created a versatile set of unique brand textures that served as abstract metaphors for the chaos, order, delight and frustration that are all inherent parts of the writing journey.
