Apostrophe

A new business was taking shape. Life came into the room.

We were working with Marsha D’Angelo on the identity for her new communications business, Apostrophe, when her father tragically died. She was building something of her own while moving through a profound loss. Understandably, she felt the project might need to pause.

We wondered whether there could be room for him in the work. We sensitively acknowledged that his death would always be part of the circumstances in which Apostrophe began. Perhaps the identity could hold a connection to him, too. That question gave our research a more personal place to begin.

We followed the photographs to the beach.

We spent time with old family photographs, including pictures from holidays on the beaches of Abruzzo, Italy. We looked closely at the places around those memories: the lettering, the signs, the distinctive shapes that belonged to that setting. The research took us into the typographic character of the Italian seaside.

Seaside archways and Italian sign lettering informed our research. These reference images show the visual world we explored alongside Marsha’s family photographs.

The classic wrought-iron beach archways gave us the starting point for a custom-drawn A. We worked that form into Apostrophe’s lettering, carrying a detail from the family’s holiday landscape into the new business. A memory could live inside a letter without needing its whole story printed underneath.

Marsha described the connection between the conversations and the creative work: “Throughout the process, Parker and Jarren really listened to me and brought forward beautiful, well-researched and impactful ideas.” The photographs had given us a place to look. Paying attention to what they meant gave the drawing somewhere to go.

The custom-drawn A carries a connection to Abruzzo’s beach archways into the Apostrophe wordmark.

The rest of the identity needed its own life.

That personal reference gave the identity depth. We also needed to make a confident, useful brand for a communications practice. We developed the lettering into a black-and-white foundation, with turquoise bringing a brighter register to the surrounding materials. It could feel assured on a business card and more playful in a sequence of social graphics.

A restrained business-card design gives the distinctive lettering room, with Marsha’s name taking the lead on the reverse.

We carried the direction into presentation materials and digital applications, working with scale, typography, and photography to give Apostrophe a recognizable way of showing up. The identity had to do the ordinary work of a new business as well as carry the extraordinary meaning at its centre.

The identity extends into a corporate communications presentation, keeping the typography clear and the content prominent.

Black, white, turquoise, and a flexible typographic system give the brand different ways to speak across a social sequence.

Some of the most important design details are personal.

We love that this identity can be encountered simply as a strong piece of lettering. For Marsha, there is something else inside it: a connection to her father and a place her family knew together. It holds a little reverence within the practical business of putting a new name into the world.

For the person founding that business, the payoff was being able to bring it forward with pride. “The result is a brand that I’m so proud to share with the world,” Marsha told us. “Harc’s team is uniquely talented and endlessly kind.” We care about those things belonging together. The finished work had a job to do, and there was a person living through a great deal at its centre.

We could not separate the project from the life happening around it, and we are glad we made room to look more closely. The detail that gave Apostrophe its character came from there.