In 1998, Kennedy and Associates, a sales consulting firm in West Vancouver, was preparing to operate under a new name: Novalliance. The firm worked with major corporations that managed their own sales forces, helping them train their people and improve how they developed new business. My studio, Poissy Design Inc. (now also Insparion), was hired to create the logo and corporate identity for the new name. It became a long working relationship, and over the following years I designed much of the firm’s printed and promotional material.

Consulting is hard to picture. There’s no product to show, and the usual imagery for sales, like handshakes, rising arrows and bar charts, was already used by nearly everyone in the field. The name itself offered a better starting point. “Nova” plus “alliance” suggested something new created by partners working together, and every concept I developed came back to that idea in one way or another.

The identity had to speak to a specific audience: senior executives at major corporations with large internal sales teams. It needed to look established enough to earn their attention and distinctive enough to be remembered. It also had to work on everything the firm would produce, starting with letterhead, envelopes and business cards, and that list kept growing.

I presented six concepts on August 17, 1998, each a different take on partnership:

interlocking puzzle pieces in blue and bronze

a pyramid standing in for the “A” in the name

a wave shape anchored by arrows pointing down to the ground

concentric squares zooming in on a target

a typographic treatment that split the name at the “A”

triangular building blocks forming an hourglass

After meeting with the client, I developed two of these further. The pyramid became narrower, with a second triangle inside it and a rough, nova-like shape behind it. The arrow concept was simplified, and the arrows were turned to point up and to the right instead of down toward the ground. That one change gave the mark a sense of forward movement it hadn’t had before, and it became the direction the client chose.

The third round, on October 5, simplified the symbol once more and set it in blue and turquoise. Along with the finished logo specification, that presentation included the letterhead and business cards, plus the first applications: audio tape labels, a presentation cover and a pocket folder.

The symbol is made of two interlocking shapes, one in each colour, meeting at a shared centre. Each shape ends in two notched arrowheads, so together they point in four directions while turning around a single point. Neither half is complete without the other, which is the partnership idea from the first round in its simplest form.

The wordmark started from Serpentine Sans, set in lowercase. I modified it and letterspaced it widely so it would sit as a calm horizontal base under the movement of the symbol.

The palette is two spot colours: PMS 286 blue and PMS 320 turquoise. Splitting them across the two halves of the symbol keeps each shape distinct while the mark still reads as one form. The blue gives the logo the weight that formal documents need, and the turquoise keeps it from feeling like a bank.

For this case study, I created a new set of mockups to show how the identity holds up today: a sales binder, glass office signage, a coffee mug, a website, an embossed leather organizer and a sales training session. The final frame repeats the symbol as a black-and-white pattern, with a single full-colour mark in the field.

These are new presentations of the identity, not photographs of pieces produced for the client, and the website copy is invented for the mockup. I assembled them into a short video with matched framing and slow camera movement, so the identity reads as one system rather than a set of separate items.

The symbol was drawn for letterhead, audio tapes and pocket folders, 28 years before anyone put it on a laptop screen or a glass door. Apart from a few small refinements to the wordmark for these mockups, it needed no updating to work in either place. That wasn’t something I planned in 1998. It came from simplifying the mark until it no longer depended on the style of its time.

My role: Creative direction and design: concept development, logo and wordmark design, typography, colour specification, and the identity’s application across the client’s printed and promotional material, plus the portfolio presentation.

Deliverables: Logo and standalone symbol, colour and type specifications, letterhead, envelopes and business cards, audio tape labels and CD packaging, presentation covers, pocket folders, binders, sales material, and the portfolio mockups shown here.