Earlier this year, we helped Watie White (nationally-known artist) develop a brand for himself. The great thing about working with artists is that they’ve already done the heavy lifting. A visual artist, by default, already has a brand. (This is especially true for Watie, whose work is visually and conceptually consistent.) So really, our job was just to extract the visual thread out of his existing work.

Watie White business card collection

His work is divided across all kinds of media, but it’s unified by a terrific constructed-ness. You can see every mark he’s made, and each of them is essential to appreciating the work as a whole.

So, instead of building the brand around complete works, we zoomed way in, using a random sampling of his work. The cards are printed on Eames Painting Canvas paper, featuring eight different scans. Watie’s signature serves as the logo, and it’s always reversed out of a darker background — re-iterating the mark-making that’s so essential.

We followed up shortly afterward with a new website, where you can see plenty of Watie’s work.