True story — Gabe and Renata had discovered Genius and were obsessively sharing links to lyrics and interpretations of the songs they loved through the app for months before a friend linked us up to the folks at the app. We had to admit our obsession right away because it’s such a great platform — essentially a Wikipedia for music, breaking down lyrics with line by line annotations that can be edited by anyone around the world: it’s an interactive guide to human culture. We loved it so much and were ready to help in any way we could to ensure the brand’s success.

What they needed, and we were happy to deliver, was innovative brand design to help their sales and marketing teams define Genius’s visual positioning. They needed to stand out in a way that truly reflects their unique offering especially with the number of creative partnerships they were about to pursue. Genius needed to have its own identity so that it was clearly its own thing and not an extension of the large brands with which it would partner. As we would be performing full-service work for them, we decided that a 6-month contract would fit their needs best and we would be their dedicated firm for all of their graphic design.

We first performed a full brand analysis. Looking to the digital music space we quickly realized that they are offering a connection to music that is totally unique — there are no direct competitors. We would need to convey this special identity throughout all of the branded materials. Thankfully we were already in love with the design of the brand already so we focused our efforts on other areas. Working with the sales department at genius, we created pitch decks that not only expressed the history of Genius but would allow them to demonstrate the ways the app might pair with larger sponsors for music events and distribution. In these presentations, we showed the way future campaigns could come to life with clickable ads, visual campaigns, and digital outreach such as hot sites for lyric interpretation. Additionally, we designed Genius’s 5-year campaign — an animated video that would be shared on all their pages. Looking to the future, one of the greatest contributions we made was to create a strategic template deck. This deck provides the sales team with blank slides that can adapt to meet any of their presentation needs. Part of this re-design also included ideation of their e-mail templates that are sent automatically whenever a user takes action. In addition to these projects we also created really imaginative Christmas artwork for their Instagram, colorful and contemporary merchandising ads as well as a number of pitch decks, avatars for social media, and other graphic elements for their use. We’re so proud of the work we performed with Genius as their retained branding firm. Being committed fully to them for a number of months really allowed us to approach each design problem efficiently as we did not need to negotiate the work piece by piece. As we continued to work with them across the board on their graphic designs, presentations, multi-platform campaigns, social media graphics, and motion graphics, we continually were amazed at how Genius is growing and continues to touch the lives of music lovers.