FAIRWINDS Rebranding

Before I was a Creative Director at FAIRWINDS, I was a "Senior Web Designer" — and it was a fairly vague set of responsibilities. I was hired to be both a web developer and to do the occasional designs, but we didn't yet have a project management system and I wasn't given a lot of direction on what I needed to do...so I had to start figuring out how I could best contribute.

I decided to take it upon myself to build a pitch deck on how we could refresh our brand both visually and in terms of copy tone. This was a place that I had called my bank since my mother set up an account for me at 6 years old, after all, and this was my shot to give us a more modern look.

I wanted to try to find something that felt fresh, gave a friendly and approachable vibe, and would be bold enough to have us stand out from our competitors. I created 4 different designs and scheduled a meeting with the VP of Marketing and our Executive VP / Chief Member Officer expecting this to be the first round of designs of many. To my shock, they had picked a design I had called "Making Waves" before the first meeting was over.

My next step was to codify the new brand. I worked with the team to get opinions on and select our final set of fonts, colors, and copy tone and started to build out our first full style guide.

To make it easier for others in Marketing, I had built a series of templates and components for our emails, social posts, and display ads in Adobe XD (later I would recreate this in Figma).

While it started with a soft launch in a few key areas, the new FAIRWINDS refresh would fully be release as part of the "Polaris" project and is still in use today.