It’s always a pleasure to work with great shutterbugs, and at Hexanine we’re proud to partner with some excellent ones. In our ongoing work with the excellent Golden Apple Foundation, we’re working alongside talents like Greg Hinchman and Patrick Fahrner, and recently we banded together to traverse around the Loop in Chicago for a shoot. Great deli sandwiches, 11 portrait subjects, slight sunburn — all together, a fun and very productive day.

Inspiration is at the heart of what we do on a daily basis at Hexanine, and it’s something we love to talk about. That’s exactly what our co-founder, Jason Adam, did with the great folks at Western Digital’s Ventito in a wide-ranging interview. Here’s a snippet:

“My attitude now is the same as it was before: Opportunities need to be uncovered. And the best way to do that is by consistently making unreasonable requests. There’s almost always nothing to lose, and wild and incredible experiences to gain.”

You can check out the rest of the interview at the link above, and hear from other experts in creativity at Ventito.

Great work is the lifeblood of what we do, so it’s always fun to showcase work, even if it has been hiding behind the curtains for a while. Here are a couple such projects: Website design and branding work for Ashley Furniture, and an identity redesign for ILC. More details of these projects follow at their respective portfolio pages, so check ‘em out.

The world is changing. We are rapidly evolving away from a marketplace ruled by mass culture, to one filled with a riotous patchwork of specific niches. Not long ago, one-size-fits-all communications, branding, and products stood at the top of the heap. Whether it was the Big Three TV networks, Top 40 Radio, or products designed for the Average Jane, traditional marketing and branding sought the widest spread and the largest customer base. But in 2014, these bastions of lowest common denominator thinking are slowly crumbling, thanks to the increasing fragmentation of media, culture, and interests. And these fragments — whether you call them tribes, micro-communities, or niches — have powerful potential for organizations, brands, and marketers.

The Internet has driven much of this change, providing a forum and technology for people to discuss, exchange, and rally around their favorite products, services, or interests. DVRs, shrinking electronics, and personalization search algorithms have also kneecapped the effectiveness of broad-based marketing and advertising. But while this scenario is challenging for those who still pursue the target audience of “anyone with a heartbeat,” there are opportunities out in the margins of the marketplace for savvy, passionate people and their organizations.

Niches have grown in and among the weeds of our culture, often centered around demographics, causes, shared interests, or the love of a product or service. Many of them present amazing opportunities for brands and marketers to tap into existing passion, or to create goods and services that people will respond to with zeal.

Good business is where you find it, and niches have potential value for marketers or organizations who find a fit, and are able to engage a micro-community — by opening new markets, co-creating ideas together, tapping “experts” for ideas or consultation, or engaging tribes as part of larger brand strategies. The number of opportunities is staggering, with the potential to birth small companies that reach even smaller audiences, to disrupting existing markets, creating new industries, or just reaching those with particular hairstyles.

After combing through the underbrush of culture and online forums, your team might see marketing potential in already-gathered tribes, but it’s not quite a point and shoot process. Niches are like bad science projects — they have the potential for great energy output and passion, but they also are very combustible. It doesn’t take much for a tribe to implode, disband, or destroy itself from within. It takes an astute traveler to navigate these ecosystems, all of which have their own rules, customs, and languages. Every micro-community is different, and require different approaches, methods, and tactics. You wouldn’t speak Klingon to a sabermathematician, but there are some general principles to consider when venturing into niches. Here are our necessary signposts to read along the way:

1. The passion of the few is better than the “meh” of the many.
If the success of the overall Kickstarter model tells us anything, it’s that you don’t need many enthusiastic “backers” to turn a product or service into a success. But in many cases, these supporters are not mere customers — they’re invested in the process of creation and development. They aren’t just consumers, but devotees — serious and excited enough about a publication, product, or film to take action before the actual work is completed. This turns the traditional consumer-supplier relationship on its head, and it works, because people care about the end result. That caring is potentially powerful, and when gathered into a small tribe or group, this zeal can easily outweigh a much larger audience of people who could take it or leave it.

2. For best results, fully immerse.
Once you determine what niche you want to explore, supply, (or exploit), you’ll need to embed yourself in the fabric of that chosen tribe. Become a real part of the culture — observe, listen, and finally, contribute. It takes time to build trust, understanding, and personal connections. Opportunistic carpetbaggers and phonies will be ferreted out, as authenticity is often the main coin of the realm where niches are concerned. Whether it’s among Wizard of Oz fans or Intellivision geeks, establishing yourself as credible is key to becoming part of a community. Also, truly understanding a niche leads to deeper insights, rather than knee-jerk solutions.

3. Real passion is required.
There’s nothing wrong with making money, but viewing niche communities purely as cash cows or “exploitable markets” misses the point. Often, these communities spring up and exist because of true brand love — maybe it’s for classic video games or unusual documentary work, and it’s that same passion that sustains them.

Surely there are opportunities for investors, organizations, and brands seeking to embed themselves within these niches for their own good, but genuine love for the subject matter or community has to be woven into any effort. Whether you’re building a product to reach fans of 3D photography or designing an app for creatives, truly authentic efforts will win the day. This requires your team to actually join the fray, or partner with those on the inside. This is both good business and ethical action — so it’s in your organization’s best interests to either go native and become one of your customers, or hire them.

4. Ask not what your niche can do for you.
With apologies to JFK, it’s important to enter a sector or tribe with a servant’s mindset. What needs do you see? How can you (or your organization) become inherently valuable to the residents of this subculture? Where do your offerings and their needs intersect? Engaging fans (and people) at this level removes some of the opportunistic stench from your efforts and disarms those who are skeptical of your intentions. It’s important to be transparent and honest about your desires, but it’s also just good form to pitch in and help before you ask for something in return.

5. Can you shrink?
Once you’ve chosen a community to focus on, and a way to engage with them, practical considerations crop up. Can your team streamline itself enough to handle a smaller, leaner business model that serves less people, but does so more intensely? Is it possible to narrow your offerings and still be profitable? These scaled-down strategies are not for everyone, but they are often crucial in effective efforts to reach overlooked niches. Mattel became an intriguing example of this when it morphed some of its less-profitable mass retail toy lines into collector-focused, subscription based offerings. Prices might be higher for collectors, and margins might be slimmer, but the brand is carving profit out of a long tail of desire by tapping into an intense fan community. It might require more personal touch and effort, but strategies like this make sense for many organizations.

6. Take the long view.
Truly embedding into niche cultures for business reasons isn’t an overnight endeavor. Just like constructing a building’s solid foundation, it’s important to build, grow, and contribute in a way that is measured, authentic, and stable. Like any good relationship, your organization’s connection to a micro-community will take time to germinate, but if the audience is responsive and positive, great things can happen. Some amazing organizations have grown out of brands’ efforts to satisfy and delight a niche audience. And often times, today’s niches become tomorrow’s mainstream.

“Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience. Usually I didn’t wind up getting the money, either. The things I did because I was excited, and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I’ve never regretted the time I spent on any of them.”

Occasionally we’re asked to partner with organizations who are looking to revive an old brand, resuscitate a product, or reclaim dormant intellectual property. Sometimes it’s for a brand new venture, or it’s a company rummaging through its archives for untapped assets. These behaviors can make a lot of sense, because typically, someone else has already put money, time, and effort into making that brand a recognizable one. The math seems deceptively easy: on paper it looks simpler to breathe life into an older brand than starting with a blank canvas. Some firms have even built their business models around reviving these castoffs. But it’s not always that easy.

The discard pile can be treasure or trash, and picking from this mixed bag comes with a set of concerns that shiny, newly-minted organizations don’t have to contend with. There are potential pitfalls a-plenty, but with a combination of well-deployed legacy and fresh direction, reviving an old brand can become a worthwhile endeavor.

Here are 10 thoughts for anyone who aims to reclaim an aging brand and reconfigure it for today’s world. These nuggets might be the difference between dumpster diving and panning for gold.

1: What drives you to drive the brand? There are many motives for reviving a dormant brand, and most of them revolve around the possibility of good ROI. This is business after all, but like Billy Joel said, you gotta have soul. If your organization merely sees that brand as intellectual property to be exploited, or are looking to squeeze the last drops of blood out of it, you might think twice. Better to bring it back to life because there is something within worth saving — passion or ideas worth mining. Is there an untapped promise or potential in that comatose brand? How does it relate to what you want to do? If you can successfully coax out that unique spark and marshal it on your behalf, the profit will eventually follow.

2: Assess your assets. Where are the valuables stored, and what exactly is your team getting when inheriting this brand? What bits of value does this brand still have? A recognizable logo? Memorable colors? Taglines or famous catchphrases? Or maybe it’s a loose association or connection to a cultural ethos? In this stage of the process, it’s important to dig deep and do the necessary research to understand what’s still valuable. Are the strengths transferable? Sometimes it’s the subtleties and nuances — echos of a brand’s mark in the world — that can hold the most lasting value.

3: Standing for something. Whether it’s today or tomorrow, you need to ascertain the foundation — what does the brand stand for? At its apex, what intangibles and meaning did it contain? Can it represent those same things today, or does it need to embrace a new spectrum of symbolism to survive (and thrive) in the current marketplace?

4: What do all the people know? Where public-facing brands are concerned, it’s all about the audience. You might see something redeeming in that sleepy brand of coffee or stereo manufacturer’s name, but what do people out in the world think about your new treasure? How do they relate to the brand today? Good research will be able to help uncover the current feelings and associations the brand has among the people who matter.

5: Find your fan base. Do niches and segments of brand lovers still exist? One of the biggest benefits of claiming an old brand is finding the dedicated pockets of true-believers who still carry a torch for your reawakened brand. In it’s absence, they wrote, created, argued, and reminisced about the products, services, or benefits your brand once offered. Can you tap into those fans? Will those sparks turn into a towering inferno as you help mobilize these self-made evangelists?

These die-hards can be your best friends or your worst enemies, depending on how you play your hand. While they might be devoted to the name or cause, they will be a major headache to your team if you can’t live up to the legacy of the original name (at least as they might see it). Sometimes re-engaging with a brand’s devotees can be more arduous than building a brand new audience. Zealots come in all flavors — choruses of angels or a busloads of devils.

6: Has time healed all wounds? Sometimes history is kind, and the rough edges or missteps of organizations get lost to time. But in other situations, one single act can turn a company name into a hated buzzword. Have the years been kind to your brand? What timely facets and associations have evaporated? History can be a helpful benchmark for what is still valuable — because sometimes cream rises to the top. What has stood the test of time? Those might be the brand assets worth preserving.

7: Evolution or death! Like sharks, stagnant brands die, regardless of how old they are. Remember that all brands need to grow and evolve, and if your brand isn’t moving forward, adapting, and morphing to fit the needs of the culture and marketplace, it’s heading backwards. And that’s how the brand got swept into the dustbin in the first place.

8: Show me the skeletons. While it might be cheaper to build on an existing foundation, you have to do your due diligence as well. Brands are no different. Sometimes you’re also inheriting the dirty laundry and rotten floorboards in forgotten corners of the house. Will those landmines hamstring your new efforts? It’s probably best to consider if you’re equipped to deal with the imagined worst-case scenario.

9: Grey isn’t always gold. Not all old things are worth reviving. LPs might be cool, but is anyone itching to fire up their old 8-track player? There’s a difference between momentary fashion and a brand hook that can evolve back into a sustainable business model. Sometimes that layer of dust is just irrelevancy, and the savvy marketers should be able to spot the difference through the cobwebs.

10: Have a plan. Crafting and building brands is not like investing. Stock values move on just one axis — they can go up or down. But brands are more mercurial, and require more than just capital to refresh them. These rebuilt brands need passion, vision, and strategic planning for the future in order to grow well. Forgo the passion, and brand resurrection just becomes the mechanical act of squeezing more blood from the same stone. Think brand love will win breed success alone? Unfortunately, passion isn’t a business plan.

Without a strategy for growth, development, and communication, your brand will never evolve into what it could be. Still, when it comes to reviving a brand, true love and care for the brand will shine more brightly than a holding company’s financial stake. And brand audiences can sense true passion, because it shows itself in all touchpoints for a particular service or product.

When brands are reborn, often the intangibles are the only things left. Emotions, associations, and half-remembered connections are the clay that can be molded and shaped for new purposes — those of your new endeavor. The teams who can harness those spirits and weave them into provocative brand stories are the ones who will win the day.

Some examples. The good, great, and meh:

Shinola, watches, leather goods, and bicycles all made in Detroit. Previously makers of shoe-polish.

“It would be a company steeped in the values of an older era, and the founding team wanted a name to match. ‘We didn’t want to try to invent a name that had heritage and pretend there was history behind it,’ COO Heath Carr says, so they looked for inactive brands that were on the market. They eventually came across Shinola, along with the ‘ever-so-famous saying that comes with the name,’ Carr says.”

Shinola is experiencing strong sales, great buzz, and success because they’ve zealously stuck to their brand’s plan and ethos. Their leadership team also seem to have a deep understanding of how much to accentuate or downplay certain aspects of the brand’s name and heritage for the best results. Full story by Fast Company.

Polaroid, digital and imaging products. Previously innovators and originators of instant film.

“It’s one of the famous brands, like Rolex, Nike, Coca-Cola,” Polaroid CEO Scott Hardy said. “Polaroid went through its troubles, but its asset was its brand, and now we are going through a tremendous resurgence of that brand,” he said.

While Polaroid has jettisoned much of the innovative tag that surrounded the original company, the current caretakers are being judicious about their licensing model. Their choices seem well-selected to avoid hitting any sour notes that would contradict what the brand has come to stand for. Also, they get high marks for clever transference of the brand’s personality into their physical locations. More details at TwinCities.com.

Atari, pioneers of home video games and coin-operated arcade games with a meteoric rise in the 1980s. Today, current rights owners are struggling to escape bankruptcy and reform.

“To many of us, the name Atari represents the birth of the video game industry, both in the arcades and at home—which, coincidentally, were also two separate Atari businesses. Either way, the name is synonymous with video games.”

Sadly, the Atari brand is a mere shadow of what it once was under its original banner. The most recent incarnation’s leadership realized too late that merely recycling its popular properties wouldn’t be enough to sustain it as an organization. But their pre-bankruptcy move into smartphone games and apps was a promising step. The jury is still out. More at PCMag.

Indian Motorcyles, one-time competitors to Harley-Davidson, original company closed in the 1950s.

“It’s a phenomenal American story with an entrepreneurial spirit,” said Steve Menneto, Vice President of Motorcycles at Polaris. “We wanted to bring that forward and blend it into what we’re doing with the brand. We want to show riders what we learned from Indian’s history.”

An interesting brand that has a small-but-passionate audience, Indian is still young. But its focus on engineering takes a page from what the original company was known for, and fundamental focus on innovation rarely goes out of style. Whether this will be enough to make a sizable dent in the market versus Harley-Davidson remains to be seen. More at Fox Business.

“Sell your expertise and you have a limited repertoire. Sell your ignorance and you have an unlimited repertoire. He was selling his ignorance and his desire to learn about a subject. The journey of not knowing to knowing was his work.”

- Richard Saul Wurman on Charles Eames

Sometimes the tomorrow of yesterday is even more intriguing than the present. It’s fun to look back at past predictions of what “the future” would look like — flying cars, spaceports, food pills. But buried beneath some of those fanciful ideas are nuggets of insight and amazing visions.

Futurist and artist Art Radebaugh was one of those visionaries. Radebaugh was known for his beautiful airbrushed illustration and syndicated newspaper strips “Closer Than We Think” and “Can You Imagine?” in the late 50s and early 1960s. Each of the hundreds of entries he created was a jaunt into possibility, as his artistry was inspired by snippets of scientific breakthroughs or upcoming technologies.

Hexanine partner Tim Lapetino is working on efforts to preserve the work and name of Radebaugh, and wrote an article this month for our friends at Geek Magazine on the artist. It’s featured in the August 2013 issue of the magazine.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Radebaugh’s creative visions were fueled by a post-war optimism that centered around new technology and progress, ideas that were still en vogue when his work began. There’s very little trace of cynicism in the concepts he put to paper, even though they dealt with topics like disease, famine, and military conquest. While some might look back on that perspective as naive, the reality is that Radebaugh’s art is a product of his time. Each piece is a unique reflection of a more hopeful time.

This issue of Geek is available in digital editions, or at local book retailers. But our work with Art Radebaugh and his artwork has barely begun. Watch this space for some upcoming Radebaugh-focused announcements. We’re excited about what the future (of the past) holds.

Closer Than We Think & Can You Imagine? © Tribune Content Agency, LLC  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

“Well-designed logos are the work of the designers. Successful logos imply the company’s use of the logo.”

-Per Mollerup, quoted in Steve Heller’s interview at The Atlantic.

Last week I had the privilege of moderating the panel discussion at the premiere event in our AIGA Los Angeles Blueprint series. We brought four of LA’s finest independent designers to NextSpace in Culver City, CA for a two-hour discussion on the business of freelancing.

While freelance designers love to talk about their creative work, they’re often less fond of talking about their businesses. Such “boring” topics as accounting, taxes, legal issues, business strategy and client relations are often considered necessary evils, reflected by their time spent in the conversational spotlight.

And that’s no good.

We at AIGA think nuts-and-bolts business information is vital to any self-employed designer, so we created the business-focused Blueprint series to find out if the rest of the self-employed design community does too.

Turns out they do: The event was sold out, and we practically had to kick attendees out the door after it ended, they had so many questions for our panel.

Speaking of the panel, I can’t say enough good things about this talented and experienced group, and I’m honored to call them my friends.

• Petrula Vrontikis founder of Vrontikis Design Office, an Art Center professor and AIGA Fellow
• Heather Parlato founder of Parlato Design Studio, a boutique design agency
• Spencer Cross, founder of TokyoFarm and Kernspiracy
• Mark LeRoy, the founder of Escape Hatch, a luxury travel company, and silverECHO, a brand strategy, marketing and design agency.

The discussion was lively and thoughtful, stocked with behind-the-curtain, practical insights and suggestions. We could have easily talked another hour or two, and barely scraped the surface of both the topic, and the panel’s collective knowledge on it.

Above: AIGA Los Angeles Blueprint: Freelance panelists from left to right: Jason Adam (moderator), Mark LeRoy, Heather Parlato, Spencer Cross, Petrula Vrontikis.

Among my favorite insights for freelancers:

You’re a business owner, not a designer. On average, all four panelists spend about 30% of their time designing. The rest is spent running their business, or in business development.

Titles are important. Not one of our panelists refer to themselves as a “freelancer,” opting instead for terms like solo-practice (or in Mark’s case, Contract Marketing Director), which offer elevated positioning.

Where you decide to work is a personal decision. The panel was split on working alone from a home office, or working from a co-working space or shared office. Heather recently gave a shared office space a go, but found it too distracting. The consensus was this is a very personal choice. For those opting to work at home, Spencer suggests dogs.

Freelancing allows you to keep a larger portion of your earned money. For those considering making the leap to freelancing full-time, and concerned about financing the jump, Heather suggested that one can expect to pay significantly less in taxes as a freelancer than she did as a full-time employee.

Flat fees vs. billing hourly. Our entire panel typically bills projects on a flat-fee basis, vs. billing hourly, with a few small exceptions, such as revisions or production work.

Effective positioning and communication helps attract the right kinds of clients. Mark suggests using analogies: “I sell Mercedes’. If you want a Ford, this might not be a good fit.”

“Work directly with the client” except when… Petrula explained: If you have a very specialized skill, such as an illustration style, etc., you can command a premium fee for your work, and it may be beneficial to subcontract through other agencies. Just ask lots of questions and make sure you can use it in your portfolio.

Staffing Agencies are great in a pinch, but watch the strings. If you’re going to work with a staffing agency, read the whole contract. They likely have strict non-compete clauses included.

And we covered that in about 10 minutes. This is one smart group, and I can’t wait to get them together again.

Here at Hexanine, we’re also committed to elevating design as a professional craft through a focus on design thinking and brand strategy. We feel strongly that the more our clients utlize us as strategic consultants, the more value we can bring to the table — and their organizations.

Many thanks to AIGA LA Event Programming Chair René Quintanilla, and event producers Janette Jackson and Jenn de la Fuente for producing the event, and to all of our AIGA Los Angeles volunteers for their hard work as well. If you’d like to learn more about AIGA Los Angeles, visit our spiffy new website.

Finally, a huge shout out to Paul Dimalanta who provided the fantastic pictures.