<aside> 👋 Hi! It's me, Titus, owner of The Hideout. Throughout this page you'll see callout blocks like this. For this case study, I asked the new guy, Stephen, to share some thoughts. He took the lead on this assignment as the inaugural member of our Apprenticeship Program. I think he'll have some great insight, so be sure to read through these blocks for extra perspective. Okay, back to the case study!
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LOL Sober is a substack-based publication by Nelson Haha devoted to providing perspective and unfiltered joy from a unique point of view. In Nelson's own words he's "an amputee, recovering addict, wannabe standup comic and writer." His newsletter is thoughtful, funny and touching.
To hear Nelson describe what he's envisioning for this platform is like meeting an athlete training for the Olympics. He fully embodies everything the writes about. It's obviously a vocational calling. He's so extremely passionate about sobriety, both for himself and other people. You wanna read more, even if you're not struggling with addiction, because you feel like you're learning something — about sobriety, about him and about yourself. It's easy to become a devoted and die-hard fan.
I highly encourage you to stop reading this case study and spend a minute on this first post from Nelson's newsletter. If you come back, great. If not, I promise you're better off reading his words:
The stories are motivating, encouraging, inspiring and gut-wrenching. I love Nelson's sincerity and outlook. I hope you'll give his stuff a chance and consider subscribing to the newsletter.
I was contacted by my close friend, Nelson H, to create an identity for his online venture right around the time I was interviewing candidates for the apprenticeship role. Nelson was adamant he needed a logo and little else. For this early stage of his newsletter, I agreed. It felt like the perfect sort of project for a new member of the team; it was a self-contained, straightforward assignment with some immediate needs that would suite a mid-level designer without a ton of extra onboarding.
I made sure Nelson was aware that I'd have someone else working on the brand, but that I'd be involved the entire time. He agreed it made sense and was excited for me to have some help (it also meant we could squeeze his project in a little sooner than if I was working on my own).
I kicked off the project with the client and saved some notes, along with a few early sketches. Those sat for a minute while I interviewed some super talented people. Once I finally hired a designer, we walked through a brief together. I made sure to include several of Nelson's posts in the brief to better explain why this was a significant project to me, and to help present the overall vibe we'd be going for. We were off and running. Okay, go ahead, Stephen — introduce yourself!
<aside> 👋 Hey all, I'm Stephen! I applied to The Hideout Apprenticeship Program because opportunities for a designer like me (husband, father of 3, small town America) are far and few between. Relocating for work is hard. Uprooting my family is rough. I've got a lot at stake and my level of risk has decreased significantly over the years. I knew that if I had the chance to gain some real-life learning from Titus, little by little, I would gain the necessary skills and confidence to give full-time freelance a real shot. I feel incredibly fortunate for the opportunity!
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I assigned both Stephen and myself 2-3 pages worth of sketches. I work pretty loose and fast, so I encouraged him to do the same. His work ended up much more polished than mine and he even did some word association exercises (which I don't do enough). When we met up to look at concepts together, I was excited to see how different our approaches were. Take a look at some of the initial ideas:
Stephen's sketches pt 1
Stephen's sketches pt 2
Titus' sketches pt 1
Titus' sketches part 2
If you've jumped ahead or clicked through the substack link, you'll notice the final design was one of Stephen's earliest concepts (top left of page 2, above). Believe it or not, we didn't consider that until very late in the project lifecycle. More on that later.
I liked the mascots, the microphones and the wonky type. I decided to have us work through the disco ball badge first and build out a traditional circle lockup that could work in black and white or color. I prioritized the badge because I figured it would work as an avatar and scale pretty well. Anything else to add, Stephen?
<aside> 👋 Whenever I start any project, the first thing I usually do is create some sort of word/noun list. This helps me to create a list of things/shapes/containers that I can use to start building concepts off of. I really latched onto the idea of sobriety being a party, something Nelson had mentioned on his substack.
The process for this project was really fun. I've never sketched alongside of someone else and it was really cool to work off of some of Titus' ideas. He gave me a lot of freedom to explore and try things out. There were so many directions we could have taken, but overall, I was really stoked on the route we took. Once I mocked up the disco ball with Titus' letter stack I knew we had a winner.
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I don't remember if it was immediately after seeing this first round of sketches, but I asked Stephen to take a stab at combining some of the favorites without spending too much time on it. He honed in on one of my type lockups and fit it within the badge concept. I had jumped into Illustrator to see if there was anything we hadn't considered with the type (a smiley face, for example) but dismissed it and decided to focus on the badges.
That very middle sketch became our focus (see below).
You can see some early smiley-faces here.