JHP, Part I: Obligation and Precedent

Above: JHP in Ft. Worth, image courtesy Rion Rizzo and Creative Sources

The principle issue in re-developing a 30 year old brand is about equity: what to keep, what to discard? Part 1 of three entries describing the rebranding of JHP—an Architecture and Urban Planning firm in Dallas—and one of our largest brand and identity campaigns to date.

We would argue that the second issue is that a studio should be obligated to a Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm.

The key motivations for the re-branding were a legal obligation to change their name from James, Harwick + Partners to JHP and the desire to be more competitive and accurate with the depiction of their identity in the marketplace. Or as we frame it: the clear communication of their promise to the community.

The old identity in print.

The old identity on the web.

What emerged in the research process was the basic reality that an urban planning firm serves two clients. Those who bring the commission and those who will ultimately live and work in the place that results from that commission. Few Urbanists have gone as far as JHP to demonstrate their concern for urban planning, culminating in their Whole Community Design™ ethos. This was absent in their identity and brand promissory for the company itself. A refined and pointed new statement emerged: “Our obligation is those who live with—and within—our decisions.”

From there, a simple contention: New Urbanism defuses the dogmatic, commercialized parts of Modernism.
We would follow suit. While the existing identity system was completely overhauled, we identified and kept the equity in their identity lived through the lettering of the old logotype. The rest of the system, copy, messaging, and color theory derived from the basic tenants of New Urbanism as reprocessed to become graphic design cues.

{New Urbanism is the re-invention of the old urbanism, commonly seen before the advent of the automobile age. Inherently environmental and regional, it also deals with issues of basic human perception of scale, motifs that elicit community interaction and allow for the human experience in randomized and tangible ways: porches, alleys, lamp posts, benches, un-programmed spaces for gathering, proper vertical massing, adjusted street widths, and buffer gestures like placing trees between people and cars. It’s a massive subject unto itself in terms of psychology and mnemonic triggers that take the urban condition back to the earliest city states.}

In the end, a clear brand promise emerged, a warm, accesible and highly legible identity system was created in print and on the web, and a 300 year old map of rome from Giambattista Nolli became the inspiration for graphically coding the complex ideas embedded within urbanism—and JHP’s approach to it.

Now, in a glance, their promise speaks clearly to their clients and their client’s clients, embodies who they are, and respects who they were and where they came from, and sets them clearly apart from their competitors.

Above: an urban plan from JHP. Below, early concept typography studies.

Color study for the new identity system.

This campaign was created starting August 8th of 2008 and concluded in December. The brand launch took place on January 6th, 2009.

Client: JHP (Bob Bullis, AIA as project manager, A. Leigh Thornton as liaison)
Creative Director: Jett Butler
Design team: Jett Butler, Melissa Martin, and Sissy Emmons
Front End Code development, CMS deployment, and typographic inspiration: John Hoysa for UnsustainableDesign
Copywriting: Holly Gonzalez and FÖDA Studio
Photography: Rion Rizzo for Creative Sources