Story Driven Branding: Adding The Direforza Group’s Personal Story to their Brand
A New Chapter
After serving as a nonprofit CEO in San Diego for over 25 years, Darrah was ready to start a new chapter. Building on her wealth of knowledge and connections, The Direforza Group was born with the goal of cultivating high performance leaders and their teams. Off the bat, The Direforza Group’s name contained a piece of Darrah without directly including her name. Direforza is a portmanteau: in Italian (part of Darrah’s heritage), direzione means leadership and forza means strong. Strong Leadership.
Hueman Studio was brought on to create a cohesive visual identity and online presence, one that once finalized, was incredibly personal, yet professional.
The Root of It
After the onboarding discussions with Darrah, she let us know she wanted her logo to convey professionalism and knowledge, yet be friendly and classy. Aside from obvious visual representations of professionalism and knowledge (like a book), we proposed an olive tree. Olives represent many things, but the ones that stood out to us were friendship and the symbol of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena. To Darrah, they also represented a piece of her heritage, as the olive tree is native to the Mediterranean. We iterated on creating a scalable olive tree design and a complimentary warm color palette. The olive tree is also a nod to her services, as “like the olive tree, exceptional leaders stand the test of time, adapting to adversity while remaining deeply rooted in purpose and integrity”.
Photo Credits to my Father
From the beginning of the project, Darrah wanted to see if we could integrate her late father’s unique photography somewhere into the identity. The colorful and emotive photos were great, but would have proven difficult to use if not used carefully and strategically. When creating the visual identity, we chose colors we knew would compliment the photos, and used the photos as the main source of imagery for the website. The result is a highly artistic yet comforting visual experience infused with Darrah’s personality and roots.
Your brand can be professional and cater to your services and audience while still retaining a piece of your unique identity. Many of The Direforza Group’s brand touchpoints incorporate the CEO’s personal history into the final design.
