JHP, Part II

Any proper brand development exercise should include demonstrating to a client not just how they are different, but how they are similar to their competitors. People need truth, not cheerleading. This sets the tone for developing promise versus concept, and precedes even the first sketch.

With JHP, we went so far as to share all of their competitors’ “pitches” with the proper nouns removed—essentially, playing ‘fill in the blank’ at the corporate stakeholder level—so as to reveal to them what they didn’t know about themselves. By asking them to identify which was theirs, it became clear that most of the folks in their line of work say essentially the same things to the public; yet their work is so different.

The focus then became about expressing the duality of their approach and bringing into the light what wasn’t expressed amongst other firms. JHP’s architects define their roles as ‘obligations’ to the developer and to the community. The promissory we developed has an implicit oath to it that reflects their commitment to craft, detail, and the creation of something memorable for the environment. Typical of most clients, the good stuff is already there; our job is to extract and refine it.

Thus, a website for such a group of architects and designers does not start with concerns about content management, the color of hyperlinks, or the nature of roll-overs. It’s first and foremost about communicating an idea.

The top of page slideshows run the ubiquitous SlideShowPro, and open to reveal a completely different full screen experience for those users browsing their portfolio.

Because there was a lot of content to implement on the site, we needed an organized system that remained clean and simple yet adequately expressed JHP’s massive body of work. Our decision to segment the content implies a sense of order that is distinctive to the client and digestible to visitors. By visually breaking up the information into blocks, the content becomes legible and accessible.

We seized the opportunity to demonstrate their interest in the urban condition and the sectors they work in as well as their nation wide reach by turning maps of both into way-finding and graphic symbology.


The Easter eggs were small, subtle opportunities to show the ethos of the company. They support the promissory by demonstrating that JHP seeks information relevant to both client, tenant, owner, and the human experience in general. These Easter eggs reside in small modules placed throughout the site. For an older demographic, they appear as simple factoids. To a younger or more tech savvy demographic, they reveal deeper content. This allows the website to parse the message sent based on the type of user viewing it. They are able to literally and figuratively illustrate the tenants of JHP’s philosophy with out becoming a manifesto.

“Easter eggs” animate and conceal a wealth of secondary level content for the curious user.

JHP takes their Whole Community Design ethos seriously. We saw a clear opportunity to also tag the global community that resided in their office to demonstrate this point even more clearly. These flags were accurate and representative at the time of web launch for actual staff nationality.

Custom and customized icons for the site.

We chose colors that were approachable for their basic brand identity (and not found in their competitors’ palette). The red and blue tones were used sparingly for accent purposes for the web and to help highlight certain brand attributes. Color theory plays a significant part in how we interpret the personality of a thing or entity. JHP had relied in the past on a strident black/red/white color palette best reserved for luxury brands, sports teams, etc.—high intensity messages that seek strong emotional reactions. The well researched shift in palette pushes them towards a friendlier place, in direct contrast to their declarative promissory, that also evokes their work. Of course, the palette is bound by trend, but it centers around neutral values and tempered primary hues that will have greater longevity and more universal appeal.

The sight is built on a robust content management system and better meta than most. It’s web safe, searchable, compliant, and loads and reproduces with little or no variation on smart phones and PDA’s.

The recruitment page pays special attention to desirable qualities of the company and features of its urban location. Again, we found additional opportunities to demonstrate who JHP is (employee DART passes) as opposed to explaining who they are ("we believe in mass transit").

In JHP: Part III, we will show how their brand concept and web identity marry up with their print systems, plus how the Nolli map moves from being a way-finding graphic on the web to functioning as both symbol and unifying element in print.

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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