We have read it, heard it and seen it numerous times –
a powerful brand tells your story!
Defining brand is a challenging task so we decided to approach it as a design project. When we talk about brand, we are not referring to it as logo, business card or letterhead, ofcourse those are parts of it – what we really mean is – what does your business stand for? Defining our brand was the first thing we did even before naming our firm. It was necessary to answer few crucial questions to get comprehensive understanding of our brand –
What’s the narrative?
What makes us unusual?
What needs are we fulfilling?
Whose problem are we solving?
What would be the tagline?
After we could find an optimum answer to all these questions we were able to define ourselves as an architectural firm with international working and collaboration experience, progressive mindset and specialized knowledge in urban design, sustainable design and BIM. BIM will definitely be our USP. It is going to be an intrinsic part of our work culture through which we can achieve higher efficiency, better coordinated documents and collaborative working resulting in significant time and cost savings. Moreover we can provide our clients with interactive design experience in the form of virtual 3D models right from the conceptual stage of design which can help them in understanding and visualizing their projects from very beginning. Knowing our strengths, expertise and competencies helped us derive the services we will provide as an architectural firm – Architectural Design, Urban Design, Sustainable Design, Interior Design, BIM services and Collaboration.
Once we were able to define our brand, we arrived at the most interesting part which was naming our firm. All the brainstorming we did for naming really didn’t help us as we were just not satisfied with any of the names we came up with. Putting our creative minds at work, we then thought of taking first letter of all the services, values and expertise of our architectural practice (mentioned below) and put it through a word generator app to see what it gives us.
Architecture, Urban design, Sustainability, Interior design, BIM, Design Excellence,
Performance driven design, Parametric design, Computational Design, Energy efficiency, Optimization, Integration, Collaboration, Technical Expertise
It showed up hundreds of pages with results of many words – some that made no sense and few that were funny. We kept scrolling through the pages until we saw the word that we liked instantly ‘Iceboat’. It sounded unique, trendy and cool. But above all ‘Iceboat’ included a little part of all the things that we are doing at our firm.
We later modified the acronym ‘Iceboat’ into a graphic below to depict the services that we provide at Iceboat Studio.
Next in line was logo design. We always wanted our company logo to be simple, subtle and clean, the one that can leave a strong impression. To accomplish this we created a logo that is simple text which is subtly accented by exponentiation symbol. This subtle twist was achieved by adding communicative value to letter ‘A’ by replacing it with exponent symbol ‘^’, which in mathematical terms means ‘a quantity representing the power to which a given number or expression is to be raised’. This symbol in our logo is used to depict the added value in architectural services that we provide to our clients. The red color symbolizes energy and passion that we put into creativity and innovation.
We all have a story to share. Our first blog was a perfect opportunity for us to share ours. In coming days we plan to write series of blog posts for our readers. The topics we plan to cover are BIM, best practices in architecture, technology and architecture, architectural entrepreneurship, developments within our company and a lot more. The next in the series is going to be ‘BIM (Building Information Modeling) Vs CAD (Computer Aided Design)’. Stay tuned!