What We Do
Every business begins as an idea; a kernel in one’s mind.
From these seeds sprout the companies that change the world.
Our Mission
We’re on a mission to make a difference in the world. It’s our goal to help launch brands that are solving impossible problems, inventing the future, or improving the lives of everyone on the planet. A lofty goal for sure — and we won’t get there overnight — but it all starts with a single step. We’d love to have you join us on this journey.
We build brands people love
How do we do this? By turning our craft into science. By using the process we’ve developed over years of working with top brands. When we follow this path, strong outcomes are the result. And you don’t have to take our word for it—hear from our clients why we’ve earned 4.8 out of 5 stars on Clutch.
-
With a discovery and brand audit, C42D will work to understand the business issues you face so that we can co-design an effective brand strategy for you. That understanding will inform all of our work together.
We’ll review brand and marketing materials and conduct interviews with C-level executives and directors to unearth critical insights, examine company values, and learn about your customers, mission, and business goals.
We need to know your audience before we can build a brand and marketing to inform them. Through research and interviews with actual customers, we will explore your audiences and how your business solves their pain points.
On the visual side, we’ll look at your competition and their colors, fonts, imagery, and design elements. By understanding category-specific visual language, we’ll be able to design a brand that stands out yet still fits into the vertical you operate in.
-
Strategy is the foundational step for building a successful brand. What is your promise? How should you behave? We’ll get to the heart of that and much more. We’ll define your purpose, personality, and positioning, and pinpoint what archetype represents you.
Through interviews, analysis, and research, we’ll understand your brand from all angles, then work to flesh out the human qualities that breathe life into your brand. Extending on this framework we’ll describe brand behavior, actions and pillars. It will all come together in a brand narrative that tells your story in emotional language. We can also build a brand messaging platform and voice and tone guidance to inform all copywriting.
-
What’s in a name? Actually quite a bit of research, strategy, creativity and logistics. It’s a process we can navigate you through from start to finish.
Growing brands need a name that’s flexible and can last through the years. To get there, we’ll start with a creative naming brief that is rooted in the brand strategy. We’ll employ various naming strategies to generate a number of names that meet these strategic parameters.
Before you fall in love with them, we’ll ensure that whatever name we land on is ownable and trademarkable through prescreening. And if you’re doing business overseas, we can do a linguistics check to ensure you’re not upsetting local culture with your new moniker.
-
Your brand identity should be working for your business, not against it. Brand identity design is more than just a logo. It’s the behavior and personality of your brand, the consistent touchstone your customers experience, and the promise your employees deliver to them. It is your heart and mind made real.
We create brand identities as design systems that include patterns, icons, user interface elements, and illustrations. We arrange these foundational blocks to build all of the expressions of your brand, from web design and digital to print and video, from social marketing to ad campaigns.
We’ll start with a mood board and, from there, build identity concepts, a tagline, voice and tone for copy, photography direction, fonts, and color palette.
Any system needs guidance, so we’ll create a comprehensive brand guideline articulating how to take your brand to market. This blueprint contains rules and examples of collateral, campaigns, and digital assets.
Launching a new brand identity requires logistics planning and messaging for internal and external audiences. We’ll have a launch plan to ensure everything goes off without a hitch, especially your website.
-
Digital design is more than just building a website. Your digital ecosystem is your most crucial lead conversion and sales tool. It requires careful planning and consideration into decisions on navigation, user flow, calls to action, information architecture, and content strategy.
Fortunately, we’ve been designing websites for over ten years and have learned a thing or two along the way. We’ll start with your audience. Who are the buyers of your services or products? What are their motivations? Knowing the answers to those questions and more helps us craft the right content, user flows, and CTA’s for every buying cycle stage.
The right content won’t convert if it never gets viewed, so thinking deeply about navigation, wireframes, user flow, and conversion points is what we tackle next. We will ensure your prospects follow a step-by-step journey toward action that creates value for your brand.
Every one of the stunning sites we build is responsive and optimized to work flawlessly on mobile. We’re WordPress experts and can develop a CMS that is easy to maintain and update for your marketing team.