Brian Leach

Design Opportunity

Charvel needed a brand that spoke to its history as the raw, do-it-yourself rock-n-roll musician's machine of choice.

Solution

To honor that history, we chose to reference high-performance imagery and design from other industries: mainly automotive and sports.

Client

Charvel Guitars (Fender Musical Instruments Corp.)

Roles

• Branding
• Art direction
• Visual design
• Copy writing

As with other branding projects I take on, one of the first things I like to do is create a mood board with visuals–colors, photography, typography–that could inspire a solution for the brand direction. The iconic image I proposed was the sort of "time lapse" photo (shown above and throughout the proposal), inspired by my own experiences shooting concert photos. The result of long exposures without flash is often an interesting, emotional blend of detail and blur. That fleeting, high-energy moment of performance was what I most wanted to capture in our rebrand for Charvel.

While referencing this performance-driven imagery and branding language, we also wanted to bring back a bit of the brand's history, and so recommended resurrecting an older version of the brand's logo (commonly referred to by brand aficionados as the "toothpaste logo") to be used on merchandise and other supporting brand elements.

Aside from necessary product photography, we didn't have a budget for additional brand imagery, and so I art directed (and starred in) a photo shoot put together with our in-house creative team. 

Branding Applications

Armed with some appropriate branding imagery, I used the results of our photo shoot to build out concepts for print and web. We used a similar bold type treatment with the imagery in both product and lifestyle-focused materials.