Larry Roellig,
SBG Enterprises

We are a brand identity consultancy company. Our services are primarily graphic identity for a broad range of companies: from consumer food packaging to retail identity, from banks, to hotels to airlines. It's generally considered corporate identity but our specialty is the creation of a strong brand identity.

Branding is what makes things unique. It makes things identifiable, hopefully understandable. You have a personality; you have a voice you're trying to speak to consumers with. Generally that's in the form of a logo or a total tre dres that says as much as you want to divulge to a consumer or what you want them to take away from a total viewing experience.

If it's a package and it's a food product. You want them to have a sense that it's a high quality product and that it's going to fit their lifestyle and that it says something unique about them. Then all of those things have to be inherent within that package. The more you can make that propriety and the more you can make it a brand statement; the style of photography, the way the colors are used, the more you can own those, the more they become part of your brand.

When you think in terms of just a logo, the power of a hotel sign that's standing by the highway. The message that you're trying to deliver to a person who's trying to find a place to spend the night. You're asking a logo both for what it's saying graphically and for what people already know about the brand statement. Often it's a reinforcement of what they might have already heard through advertising or read in the paper. But the acid test in looking at a sign or when you look at a package, that's the moment of decision. That's when you decide I'm going to buy it or when you decide I'm going to go. I may have heard about this hotel, but this one looks like it's going to be a more pleasing time.

There's literally about a two-second window. First of all it has to catch your eye. It's that balance between standing out among 40,000 other selections in a supermarket, grabbing your attention and then delivering other messages about what it is.

We can't get the communication lost in the image as well. If there is an adage, our adage is communicate, don't decorate. We're not just creating beautiful packages; we're creating all of the messages you want to communicate to the consumer as succinctly as possible because people are not going to stand in front of it like somebody at the Louvre.

You have to know going in that these are the people you want to be drawn to your product and what kinds of communications messages really do fit their lifestyle.

The name is absolutely critical. We often times are involved in the development of the name and often times we're just given a name to work with.

Our challenge as designers is to work with whatever that name is and give it the most powerful graphic representation we can. But where we can be involved in the naming process, as we were here, we in fact want to make sure that the name does in fact fit the total personality profile that we tried to establish for the brand.