Squaring the Story Arc: Wakeman at 20
The Wakeman Agency’s 20th anniversary in 2023 was not a destination but a jumping off point. This is the story of how we connected and expanded our Wakeman at 20 vision through visual and brand storytelling.
Wakeman’s work is founded on deconstructing stories and using them as tools to challenge the narratives of oppressive and dominant structures. Every design choice is imbued with deep narrative meaning and every design element becomes a micro-story, a building block and a constant reminder that every pixel and word we put down on the pages of history contributes to shaping its arc towards a world where more and more people have space to tell their own story.
For this brand refresh, we distilled three principles that drove the project conceptually in a way that felt true to our brand values and ways of operating.
- Equity as a Network
- The Shape of Storytelling
- Framing as Focus
Equity as a Network
At The Wakeman Agency, we know that Equity comes from understanding the interplay between diverse experiences; by connecting our own to those of others we carve shared spaces for each other. Much in the same way that we’re composed of a myriad of smaller elements that make up our bodies, we are in turn cells of a larger social organism.
Those dynamic and vibrant interactions tell our shared story, and become the stage where Voronoi cells and fractals make up our visual design system.
The Shape of Storytelling
To shape the interactions that make up the systems that we live in, we cannot get stuck in circles, nor can we overlook how we need to maintain the space we have carved for each other in a world where history —and its inequities— repeat. Knowing that our journey is in sync with the larger arc of history, stories become the building blocks of our brand, as we prepare to build on the work that we began in 2003.
Our client engagements, the team members working on them and the people at the center of the stories we shape, orbit The Wakeman Agency’s story in the same way that we orbit the larger story of social transformation: always moving forward in a helical motion toward justice.
Contact us to learn more about our work.