A 113-year-old executive leadership institution with a name that functioned like a velvet rope. I redesigned the identity and worked with them to change the brand voice.
The Chief Innovation Officer of the Executives' Club of Chicago brought me a project that was a long time coming. The organization had been around since 1911. He wanted the new identity to feel like where the Club was going, not where it had been.
Opening materials
A lot of this project lived in a chat window. Not to generate ideas, but to do the time-consuming groundwork that would otherwise eat a week before a single mark got made.
Sample Prompts
Total time saved throughout project: 30+ hours
What followed was several months of the same conversation: positioning, naming systems, color rationale, photography language, sub-brand logic, stakeholder deck architecture. The AI never lost the thread. It remembered, four months later, why we'd already rejected the idea I was about to propose again. That's most of the value, not the output, but the continuity. A collaborator that holds the whole project in memory so you don't have to relitigate closed arguments every time you sit back down.
The aesthetic judgment, the client navigation, the reading of the room: none of that transferred. Everything that could be synthesized, retained, or iterated in language — that kept up its end.
No serif or sans-serif was left unexamined. I went from Helvetica modern to trend-wide condensed, looking for something that felt business-approachable — confident enough to sit next to a C-suite title, accessible enough that you didn't need one.
Before / After
Same organization. Different door.
Eight colors organized by emotional register, not product application. Any combination holds because the system was built around what colors make people feel, not what they're supposed to label.
The deliverable was a brand guide for the entire organization, alongside a toolkit that lets employees create on their own without design support. Written for non-designers — the full version for internal teams, a condensed version for external partners.
30+ hours saved by leveraging AI to research, consolidate reference, audit competitors, stress-test the identity, and build multiple templates and product work autonomously.
The brand was working before it was announced. Rolled out to 50+ employees before any public announcement. Adopted into LinkedIn, email, events, and sales collateral. Templates built for internal teams and external partners so the system works without supervision. The formal reveal is at a September event I've been calling Prom Night. Full buy-in at every level.
