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.
“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 nailed “the look”
Truthfully, the first iterations of the design weren’t resonating with Daniella. It wasn’t a total miss, but she wasn’t lighting up the way I had hoped.
Something was missing, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. So I decided to go back through our original notes, ignore any concrete directions she had given me (Daniella originally asked for blues and purples…you’ll notice the final site turned out red!) and honed in on her abstract ideas and feelings instead – which she was great at communicating.
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