This year, you can enter anything created in conjunction with a logo design (business cards, animated GIFs, etc.) in the new Identity Applications category of HOW’s Logo Design Awards. Plus, all entrants will receive The Logo Brainstorm Book FREE, in addition to a 20% coupon code for My Design Shop. Deadline: Oct. 9.
Designer of the Week Matthew Muñoz, chief design officer and partner at New Kind, specializes in storytelling in design, forming visual identities, strategy-building, and making information understandable, and has won many awards for his work in these areas.
Find out more about him below, and hear his in-depth story at HOW Interactive Design Conference in Chicago on Oct. 6. Muñoz will deliver a session called “Telling the Story of a Storyteller’s Brand,” which features the following takeaways: how to facilitate brand alignment, how to powerfully communicate who you are and why what you do matters, and promoting collaborative action with the journey-based mindset. Join us in Chicago to hear from Muñoz and other creatives as they share their stories from the field.
Name: Matthew Muñoz
Name of Studio: New Kind
Location: Raleigh, NC
Design school attended:Masters degree from NC State College of Design and Undergraduate degree from East Carolina University
How would you describe your work?At New Kind, our purpose is to bring people together to share in the adventure of creating the future. We use design methods to facilitate collaborative experiences, shape organizational culture, craft stories that excite and inform, and ultimately help our clients visualize and realize their future.
Where do you find inspiration? I’m wide open here. I find biological systems to be effective and find ways to bring that thinking into New Kind’s work. I’m always searching for beautiful moments: an interaction between two people, when someone is delighted by finding something new and useful, or when a team does something worthwhile together. Pocket and Feedly are perpetually stocked full of interesting articles and visual things—ready to be referenced. I also save what inspires me to Evernote—so that’s my go-to resource.
Who are some of your favorite designers or artists?My first favorite has always been Josef Müller-Brockmann. Also Picasso and Caulder. Filmmakers—like Wes Anderson—create these worlds that completely pull me in, I love that. And www.thisiscolossal.com/ is delightful.
Do you have a favorite among all the projects you’ve worked on?One of my favorite projects over the last couple of years is the creation of the Hopscotch Design Festival. We started it to bring the design communities of the region together into a 2-day festival where we could create a place to discover the people designing the future. With over 40 speakers, activities, and parties—everyone can network, be inspired by multi-disciplinary approaches, and take home useful ideas to put into practice.
Photo by New Media. Learn more about Hopscotch Design Fest here.
Is there a project that stands out to you as having been the biggest challenge of your career so far? The biggest challenge of my career is the seven-year project of building a company—New Kind. We started as two people in the economic recession. We now have a team of 15, and we’re continuously evolving.
What do you hope to accomplish in the future?At New Kind, we believe that every organization is more engaged and productive when its people work as a passionate community, rather than a bureaucracy. I hope that we’ll continue to find and partner with organizations that share this ethos.
What’s your best advice for designers today?Apply the same intentionality and action to your life and career as you do to your design projects.
Work from New Kind:
From New Kind’s website: NGINX and New Kind create a cohesive brand platform to solidify NGINX as a leader in the architecture of the modern web—and strengthen an active open source community of developers and IT professionals.
From New Kind’s website: Working with the Ansible team, we developed ways to make the story real for people inside the organization, and also for the community it serves. One key strategy was to redesign their visual identity to reflect the company’s new positioning. We created customized typefaces to give them a proprietary logo, and used powerful, clear language to convey the company’s brand story and the impact of Ansible for the IT community.
From New Kind’s website: New Kind helped a passionate community of employees, partners, and customers reinvigorate a successful and established technology brand.
Thinking about rebranding a company—perhaps your own? Learn 5 things you should think about when rebranding.
And if you’re working on positioning yourself as a branding expert or to establish your brand’s identity, check out the Building Better Brands collection, a $119 value for only $69.99.
ñoz #organizationalculture #HOWinteractiveDesignConference