Part of providing great identity design for clients is having a great identity yourself. And the new year should bring great changes, right?

We think so (and we have fun doing this stuff), so we developed a new look and feel for ST8MNT: New demo-reel books, stationary, belly bands, mailer labels, note cards and business cards with a sweet clear foil stamp. The whole branding enchilada.

Here’s your behind-the-scenes look at what went in to rebranding ST8MNT:

First, we took a look at what makes our company great… the people! We’re multi-faceted kids with different skill sets, talents, perspectives and personalities. To showcase that, we developed a triangular pattern to play off our angled 8 logo mark.

Next, we decided to preserve the crisp details from our previous brand identity. This meant less pattern, stray lines and texture, plus adding Ostrich Sans to our type family.

To personalize the cards and to build the creative culture at ST8MNT, we designed custom stamps for each employee (rather than always printing names on the cards). Here’s a great shot of printed eights at a press check:

And a glimpse of all the eights. Have a favorite?

And lastly, we updated portfolio books to include a dimensional 8 as an extension of the triangulated pattern. The show-reel suite includes a DVD sticker, booklet and case, along with a figure-eight belly band and 24-page booklet. We’re using it for social media, too.

The dimensional 8 incorporated came from the work we developed for our new demo reel over the past summer. We explored a bunch of looks that we were interested in: 3D scanning, particles, echo trailing, glitches, and anything Ash Thorp or Simon Clowes is doing. But we ended up tracking the most with what I like to call tesselated / low-poly / triangulated geometry. It’s amazing how the look has spread across the visual landscape – possibly instigated by Elastic’s Honda ads from late 2009. We’re still interested in it and have applied the effect to a few of our recent projects.

Demo Reel:

ST8MNT – “Fall Demo Reel 2012” from st8mnt on Vimeo.

Exploration translated into new portfolio books:

Thanks for taking a tour of the branding and identity development for ST8MNT.