Play House is a full-service creative studio that specializes in brand identity, design, and illustration through the lens of joyful principles and tangible assets.
About
With over 14 years of professional design experience, Play House has the experience and knowledge to understand successful design choices and application, and the speedbumps along the way that can occur for business owners of all sizes. We’ll work collaboratively in an effort to highlight your personality and ideas through your life’s passion.
And while Play House understands there is serious work at stake, there’s room — or rather a necessity — to make it fun while we’re at it.
Process
All Play House design projects have a similar flow, no matter the scale or budget. Here’s a brief rundown of what to expect when starting a project:
Discovery
FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS: Achieve a better understanding of each individual client, their business, and ideas through some basic questions to identify unique challenges and strengths at-hand.
MOOD DISCOVERY: After some basic information has been met, we’ll dive into some visual alignment, pulling existing art, inspiration, design, or otherwise to align on visual interest; this allows you to get a good idea of what to expect as a finished product, before the proverbial pencil goes to paper.
CONCEPT: Through a mix of moods and your personality and moods, we’ll nail down a loose concept. Sometimes this is rigid and bulletproof going into design exploration, and other times, fun things happen during ideation, and clients tend to flex on their initial principles.
Market Position & Analysis*
Name Ideation and/or Solidification
Brand Voice
Mood Boards & Inspiration
Concept Development
*Play House is not a data expert. Market analysis is gathered through client feedback and baseline research and trends.
Creative
EXPLORATION: Here’s where we dive into our agreed upon moods and concept, diving deep into the creative process. Without going into the whole nuts and bolts, Play House uses a mix of research, design exploration (trial and error), and unique skills to start to provide client’s with a first-look at their vision. This is typically presented unpolished and unfussy, in order to best keep the project moving at a steady pace.
REFINEMENT: Once we’ve combed through the initial design exploration, we’ll move towards refinement of one or more existing concepts, depending on the project scope. Here we explore deeper into brand identity, fine-tuning our strongest ideas, and distinguishing and selecting the perfect typography, illustration, colors, brand voice, photography, art direction, and secondary brand marks or badges.
Visual Brand Identity
Brand Voice
Brand Principles, Values, & Strategy
Art Direction & Photography Guides
Best Practices Guide (of Visual Identity)
Typography
Web Design
Application
ACTIVATION: This is where we’ll spend a huge bulk of our workload, depending on each individual project scope. During the brand activation phase, identity work starts to shine through packaging, physical touch-points for customers and tangible brand assets, brand campaigns and more. This is the meat and potatoes, and how your brand blooms!
Packaging Systems & Design
Brand Campaigns
Signage & Environmental Design
Event Design
Social Media Content & Design
Sales guides, Pitch Decks, and Presentations
Print Assets
Merch Design
What does it cost?
I deeply wish there was a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. But the fact of the matter is, every project is different in it’s project scope, budget, and deliverables. In the interest of trying to answer this as transparently as possible, here’s what I can tell you:
Play House will always provide a written estimate of services provided, and typically a tiered-price project scope, tailor-made to fit your budget.
Play House will provide transparency if an estimate is going over the projected scope, as early as possible, to ensure that there are no budgetary surprises.
Play House’s base studio design rate is $100/hour. This rate encompasses years of experience, skills acquired, knowledge & processes, as well as costs incurred living in America under late-stage capitalism…like healthcare for example.
Play House can provide 3 different project-type payments that make sense for you and your comfort-level: flat rate, hourly, or retainer services (see below).
If you KNOW you have a lot of work in the pipeline, retainer services can save folks big bucks down the road; retainer services start as low as 1 month for 40 hours, and grow as large as 12 months for 50 hours/month.
Play House takes physical checks, digital payments (plus fees), ACH deposits, and credit card (plus fees). We can even negotiate trade/other services. However, Play House does not trade design services for “exposure,” so please don’t ask. Exposure does not pay for groceries.
Will you be my BCF (best client forever)?
Consider this my manifestation corner of the website. Play House’s ideal, BFF client has the following A+ attributes:
Professional, with a sense of humor.
Bucks trends.
Values off-the-wall ideas and activations.
Appreciates the value of successful design.
Flexible and open-minded, but strong-willed.
Responsible and organized.
Empathetic & values-driven (see: a note about me).
Offers honest feedback with reason and purpose.
Pays promptly and offers transparency about schedule.
