Responses by Jay Chaney, chief strategy officer, and Dave Watson, head of design, Broken Heart Love Affair.
Background: “Under the new leadership of chief executive officer Karen Meredith, Drake International is celebrating its 75th anniversary and has a new vision for the next 75 years,” says Jay Chaney. “This platform communicates the core premise and positive energy of Drake’s new vision to the people it serves: job seekers, patients and their families, Drake’s corporate clients, and its own staff.”
Design thinking: “As the world is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain around technology, Drake seeks to remind us all that opportunity exists in humanity. No matter what innovation takes place, the future will always need you,” says Chaney. “Drake, through its 75 years, has succeeded through many technological upheavals because its core business has always focused on unearthing the potential of people.”
Challenges: “A massive global organization, Drake has many thriving businesses with unique needs and expressions that range from placement services to business automation, certification technology and facilitation, personal care work and nursing colleges. Creating a singular thought and design system that addressed everyone’s needs, desires, and services globally, and aligning many brilliant people around a singular idea was a fun and rewarding challenge.”
Favorite details: “I think what we’re most proud of is how bold the client was and how they kept pushing us to create a brand that truly reflected where they were heading,” says Dave Watson. “It’s not often you present your first round of creative and the feedback is essentially, ‘We love where this is going, but can we push it even further? Make it more expressive, more human.’ Having a client with that kind of ambition made the whole process inspiring.”
Visual influences: “One of our biggest visual influences was street art—the colors, the textures and, most importantly, the human expression behind it,” Watson says. “Drake wanted a brand that reflected the potential we all have as individuals, and what better way to bring that to life than through an art form that’s fundamentally about people leaving their mark on the world?”
New lessons: “This project reminded me that it doesn’t really matter how big an organization is or what industry it’s in,” Watson says. “If the people behind it have genuine ambition and a clear vision of where they want to go, design can play a pretty powerful role in helping them get there.”
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