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Building a brand takes a special kind of forethought. As we looked at spaces around New York City to open Community, we also worked on what Community would look like. Before I was writing full-time, I had a life in branding, working with agencies on the front end of projects to help develop the client’s identity while working closely with designers on the visual elements. One of those designers was Andrew Maxson, and over the period of a few years, we worked on over a dozen projects (charities, restaurants, marketplaces, and more) that I still stand behind.
Being able to work with Andrew on the design for Community was a dream. Our tastes align, and I trust his creativity, vision, and thoughtful approach, which are rooted in timelessness.
Last week, I sat down to chat with him about what really goes into designing a brand from scratch. We thought it would be a perfect piece about how we view ourselves. We hope you enjoy this chat, which is more about design than wine.
-Will
Will C. Farley (WCF): David suggested that we do an interview on branding and use it as a case study for what goes into brand building. We’ve worked on so much stuff together that I agreed and thought it would be a really fun way to explain what I used to do and what you still do on a regular basis.
Andrew Maxson (AM): Hell yeah.
WCF: I think we start at the very beginning. When a client approaches you, what does the conversation look like as a visual designer? What do you want to do as a designer?
AM: So, I think the most important thing that you can take away from an initial discovery conversation is to do your best to grasp their vision and their goals in the short term and long term. It’s not always easy, but you need to know where they want to take it.
WCF: How quickly does it lead to a creative discussion about visuals?
AM: That all depends on where the client is starting from. If someone is working on a rebrand as opposed to working from the start from scratch. Rebrands are fun when it’s an established client that has never actually thought about their visuals.
WCF: Do you find a lot of the most unique stuff is explored in a rebrand situation? I feel like knowing who they are as a company or concept helps when trying to hone the writing.
AM: I think interesting things can happen in any scenario, but when a brand has an idea of who they want to be, a lot of the time, that fosters the coolest, most unique concepts. With new projects, if you’re there for the first sort of genesis, they’ve maybe not had the opportunity to consider what their actual vision is. A lot of times, I think people will have concepts for a business but just haven’t fully thought through the creative side of it, and it’s cool to be there as they consider it for the first time.
WCF: So, let’s talk a little bit about Community specifically, then. When David approached me to help with the branding, I said, “Well, I’ve got this designer that I’ve worked with a bunch and other freelance projects…” so we came to you. Would you want to walk us through that conversation from your side?
AM: Yeah, I was just going back through our initial discovery docs before this, and it began with talking about the role the store would play in the neighborhood. A huge part of the vision for the store was to eliminate the intimidation, the overwhelming effect that wine stores can often have on people. So, our design came from a place of wanting to be inviting or at least calming.
WCF: Yeah, in the wine industry, we call that “the wall of wine,” which is just a wall of bottles that you don’t know anything about, and that was what we were definitely trying to avoid in the build-out.
AM: And you’ve done so.
WCF: Yeah, absolutely.
AM: I think that as friendly as the staff is at Community, in most places, it can still be overwhelming and just sort of an uncomfortable experience when you find yourself in that situation.
WCF: We wanted to avoid that claustrophobia, which we did with the kind of open space we have in our shop, but also with a solid color palette, as well as the interactive and educational elements of the store to create a more improved and enjoyable shopping experience.
AM: Yeah, absolutely. From a design point of view, it’s almost always more difficult to create something simple than to create something bonkers or maximalist instead of clean, simple, and concise that communicates your ideas and your vision while remaining true to your core concepts and personality.
WCF: Hell yes, absolutely. And when we’ve done that, it takes more time, effort, and consideration than the too-often-seen overdesigned, inconsiderate ideas.
AM: Yeah, exactly. I wanted to give the space, wine, and interactive room to speak for itself without designing it to death. It’s important to create something that is flexible and scalable and has a vertical affinity that would look as relevant and harmonious ten years from now as it does today.
WCF: So let’s talk a little bit about the act of exploring ideas from your side. If wanting to create a brand that is thoughtful but can scale, what are your considerations? What are things you like to look towards or steer away from? Is there a moodboard? Is there a guiding light that you follow? Or is it something where you let the personality of a brand drive the process?
AM: That’s a tough question. Haha. Where to start? I’m going to say something and hope it doesn’t sound as corny as it feels. I’ve never written a song in my life, though I’ve tried so many times. I’m fascinated with the way that artists can write songs. Where do you start? You start with the lyrics, or you start with the music, but I still want to know how do you write a fucking song? I just don’t know; I don’t get it.
But I think similarly about design. I’m fascinated with how it manifests for me and how other people approach building designs from scratch. For me, 99 times out of a hundred, it starts with color.
Throughout time, the best metric I know of for staying power, a design that lasts and is timeless, is color. If you can really dial that in first, you can build everything else on that.
WCF: What is it about a color that says “timeless” to you?
AM: Well, I should say not all color is. I always come back to the fashion world. They’ve done more with color than any other industry. I always think of the Aqua Parma yellow (see below) as the most timeless color in the universe. It’s always beautiful. It’s always perfect and has been for a hundred years. It will never not be gorgeous.
Fendi uses a very similar yellow, Louis Vitton uses a very similar yellow, and it sometimes pops up in the Gucci realm as well. It’s just this beautiful golden sunflower yellow that’s always great. It’s really hard to verbalize what makes it great for me or what makes it timeless. It’s more of a feeling.
WCF: I mean, that makes sense; you’re a very intuitive designer. So, for Community, what did you think about when you were exploring colors?
AM: We talked about a palette. David had given the direct that he was going for was “posh Dune,” which was our central creative direction.
WCF: He made you a playlist, too, right?
AM: Haha, yes, I need to find that. I remember it being very good. There was a lot of jazz and techno, which I was very much into, such as early 90s hip hop and a lot of Tribe [Called Quest]. But yeah, the overarching aesthetic ethos was Dune. That was the primary cue.
I also remember us discussing that he wanted it to feel like Chelsea without trying too hard to be “Chelsea,” but still definitely a part of the neighborhood, though.
WCF: Yeah. It was important to us that it showed up in a natural, harmonious way without feeling too far in any direction, that it would still feel comfortable.
AM: So, for the colors for Community, the first thing that came to mind was the Gucci Spring/Summer 2018 runway show. Before we ever talked, David had prepared mood boards. There was Dali, the wines of Gala-type stuff, lots of wide open spaces, and deserts, which visually came together in the architectural design of your shop.
WCF: Yeah, it’s the antithesis of a wall of wine. It’s not a library or a cozy bookstore. It’s the opposite. It’s open space, and that’s why our walls are deserts.
AM: I think our palate also speaks to that, like a lot of earth tones. I was looking back at the names for the color palette: granita, citrine, Caledonia green, ox blood, and Lancia.
WCF: You know I love the car nerd references.
AM: Another reason we work well together. This is similar to the work we did for Terroir, where we wanted the palate to speak, not only to the space through earth tones but in a way that would let the wine speak for itself. There’s just so much art to look at; the packaging needs space to show itself off.
WCF: Breathing room.
AM: Exactly. 60 or 70 percent of our palate are very earthy tones. Then, we wanted to come up with a color that we could use as our primary bold. Something that’s very optical, which is the final community red. The palette reflects the products and speaks to the product itself, wine, of course, but also to like provenance and terroir and actual land. To evoke the earth is a lofty goal, but it was what I was shooting for.
WCF: So we got the colors figured out. What about the logo? How does that process work for shapes, icons, word marks, and fonts? Oh, and as a font nerd, you’ll be happy to hear that a couple came in the other day just to ask about the fonts. They asked me, “Who picked these? They have great taste.”
AM: Really?
WCF: Absolutely. They were designers who were gallery hopping and recognized that we had made some distinct (and unique) choices for how our two fonts work together.
AM: That’s awesome to hear. It’s truly high praise. Makes my day. As far as type goes, I was looking for options with balance and the right ratios. I wanted to balance a lot of that natural tactile analog feel with something that felt very modern. Again, pointing back to Dune and the very natural palette.
WCF: Would you briefly explain what a foundry is for those who might not know?
AM: A foundry is a typography design studio. And while I’m a lover of these type of companies I don’t gravitate towards one over another because the provenance doesn’t matter as much as the actual product. I think what we chose for Community is incredibly elegant. We ended up with Maria Connected from Three Dots Type from Poland and Apris from Berlin-based Schick Toikka.
The primary wordmark font is Maria, and I was looking for something that was flexible, scalable, elegant, spoke to the space, and felt harmonious with all of our natural elements. I think it feels very analog while being hyper-modern and super useful for headlines, products, names, and the wordmark. Apris is a font for legibility. It’s classic and serif-y, but there’s also a modernist element to it, but not in a corny way. I think it’s refined.
WCF: When you say modernism, you’re talking about current, contemporary modernism, not classical modernism, which I equate with fonts like Helvetica and Apris. If anything, it feels somewhat like a reaction to the harshness of high-modernist font design.
AM: Yes, exactly. This is a font that was designed to live in a digital space before a print space, but I think it looks really nice in a natural printed world.
WCF: Yeah it feels very natural on the page to me. It’s similar to some of my favorite poetry book fonts.
AM: Yeah, I can’t really pinpoint it, but there’s something about it that is just very, very digital. And I don’t know how to verbalize it, but I think it transcends both spaces.
WCF: Yeah, I love that font, honestly. Anyone who calls it boring can fuck off. It’s highly legible and insanely practical, but I think there’s a deep beauty to it. At the end of the day, we’re trying to communicate, and it does that so well.
AM: Yeah, with Maria, it’s a little different because it speaks to the posh Dune idea. It’s very glyph-like, while Apris feels a bit runic. Apris is very pretty in the thin and light weights. You can tell that’s where they started, and then reluctantly, they had to add heavier weights. The light ones are really where it shines.
WCF: Let’s talk about the actual icon itself, because this is what most people think of as a “brand” for better or worse. What was your approach? Maybe we can talk about a few roads not taken.
AM: Yeah. The icon for this was very easy. I feel like we honed in on what we have pretty quickly. There were a few others that you and I were just looking at.
WCF: Yes, I had forgotten about the flower inspired by a mid-century print book.
AM: We wanted something that, again, felt natural but also a little a little futuristic. Maybe that’s the word I should be using instead of modern. Futuristic makes me think of THX 1138 or 2001 with a baseline futuristic font from the 60s. But we also wanted something that had a bit more depth and history, something that felt ancient. So I went into that design looking to balance timeless with future looking, something that looks like it came from elsewhere, a place with history.
WCF: Now that we have three or four potential icons, what happens next in the design process?
AM: It was very collaborative—really best-case scenario. We went back and forth, looking for what felt right.
WCF: You know, I’ve been a naming specialist, and that feeling is so, so important.
AM: Absolutely. A big part is the client sleeping on a design and living with it for a moment. I used to work for Brooklyn Brewery, and there was an anecdote that when Milton Glaser designed it, it was so extremely Milton that the founder of Brooklyn first saw it and hated it. He thought it was corny. So, Milton told him to put it on his fridge for a week. Over the week, he and his wife and kids realized that there was something to it, and by the end, they loved it.
WCF: Yeah, in all our projects, we talk about how emotional branding can be. You want to design something that resonates with the client, even to the detriment of your own taste.
AM: Luckily, in this case, David has good taste, and you and I have good taste, so we came up with the strongest possible thing. The final step is adding the colors and the different wordmarks to see how they look together. Then, you apply them to practical examples like physical merchandise to see how they feel in reality. I mean, I have the Community hat on right now.
WCF: That rules.
AM: I think it looks great.
WCF: I love our totes which I think stay very true to our original vision of merchandise. So that’s the start to finish (brief) overview of visual branding. Thank you so much for sitting down to talk about this. I had so much fun doing this. Truly love what we made.
AM: Dude, thanks so much!
