You’ve probably seen or heard Daniella before– she’s the voice of Madam Nazar in the video game Red Dead Redemption and was the voice of Colgate Optic White for six years. Her TV credits include HBO, CBS, FX, and her film work includes Oceans 8, Appropriate Behavior and her directorial debut, OMA.
After taking some time away from marketing herself, she’s stepping back into the spotlight with a fresh sense of direction. She’s shifted creatively and needed help packaging up her multidimensional self in a way that feels concise and marketable.
She came to me wanting to:
- Shift her portfolio into a marketing-focused website
- Capture, condense and reflect who she is as an artist
- Channel some gritty NYC aesthetic
We started with branding
The reference images Daniella shared with me had a golden thread of artful chaos. I saw bold imagery, bright color pops and mixed fonts.
Holding the idea of “refined maximalism” we created this logo and brand board.Daniella was given a pack of logos so she’d always have the right file for her needs, and access to editable graphic templates so she’d have the flexibility to make edits as her brand evolves.
“I didn’t expect it to be such a meaningful experience. I really thought we were just going to talk about fonts and colors.”
-Daniella RabbaniHow we worked through the sticky stuff: Nailing the “look”
This was one of the few projects where I wasn’t able to create a website design that resonated with the client within the number of revisions included in her package. It wasn’t a total miss, but Daniella wasn’t lighting up the way I had hoped. It’s rare that this happens (it’s occurred twice in dozens of projects at this point), and it’s required a different solution each time.
In this case, I decided to go back through our original notes, ignore any concrete directions (Daniella originally asked for blues and purples…you’ll notice the final site turned out red!) and pull out her emotive words instead. I honed in on her abstract ideas and feelings, which she was great at communicating.
And I took one last stab at designing a homepage – this time with a completely different vibe than my previous drafts. And she loved it.
“I really appreciate you understanding my brain, my visual style, my style of learning, my style of communicating. Clearly you want to be generous with me, which feels really nice. Even the way you write your emails – like you’re friendly but you’re also so clear and concise and it cuts through the overwhelm for me. Like ‘oh my gosh this is really hitting the way I learn’.”
-Daniella Rabbani
