griffO works
Identity and collateral for griffOworks, an early-stage edtech startup that needed a brand credible enough to raise funding and playful enough for the students its product was built for.
Identity and collateral for griffOworks, an early-stage edtech startup that needed a brand credible enough to raise funding and playful enough for the students its product was built for.
project type:
Brand Identity & Collateral
year
year:
2022–2023
my role
my role:
Designer
client
client:
griffOworks
griffOworks
Project Credits
Project Credits:
Creative Director: Terri O'Brien · Designer: Jonah Duvall
setup
griffOworks was an early-stage edtech startup built around a real problem — high school students are expected to make decisions about their careers and education with very little to go on. The company's goal was to give them a better way to explore those paths before committing to one. It was an early-stage company with a clear mission and a founding team in place, but it still had to earn people's trust, and a lot of that fell on the brand.
The brand had to read credible to the adults who decide whether a startup is worth funding — investors, educators, school districts — while still feeling approachable to the high school students the company existed to serve. If you lean too far toward institutional, you lose the students. If you lean too far toward playful, an investor stops taking the funding ask seriously.
insight
Most of this came down to the logo. I started there, and once the mark worked, it told me how everything else should look.
The wordmark pairs two typefaces doing opposite jobs. King Caslon brings the warmth and credibility of a serif with history behind it — the part that says education, trust, take us seriously. Futura underneath adds the structure and forward lean of a company looking at the future of work. Then a custom cut on the lowercase g pushes the mark away from anything traditional, and an apostrophe-like detail near the o gives it personality. It also nods quietly to O'Brien, one of the founders.
Most brands pick one of those two feelings and commit to it — either serious or playful, because trying to do both usually means doing neither well. The griffOworks mark holds both at once. Once that worked in the logo, I had a reference for everything after it.
setup
griffOworks was an early-stage edtech startup built around a real problem — high school students are expected to make decisions about their careers and education with very little to go on. The company's goal was to give them a better way to explore those paths before committing to one. It was an early-stage company with a clear mission and a founding team in place, but it still had to earn people's trust, and a lot of that fell on the brand.
The brand had to read credible to the adults who decide whether a startup is worth funding — investors, educators, school districts — while still feeling approachable to the high school students the company existed to serve. If you lean too far toward institutional, you lose the students. If you lean too far toward playful, an investor stops taking the funding ask seriously.
setup
insight
insight
execution
From the mark, I built out a working brand and used it across the materials the founders actually pitched with. Bold red anchored the palette and carried consistently across everything. I designed the stationery, the investor sheet, the process sheet, the pitch deck, and the white paper — the documents the founders walked into rooms with. These had the hardest job in the brand. They had to lay out the problem, the market, the funding ask, and the financial projections in a way an investor could follow, while still looking like real design and not a template.
I designed the website graphics and the brand world that ran through it, plus a set of After Effects animations — spinning globes, bullseyes, shifting folders — that gave the static brand some motion for web and social.
outcome
The work produced a complete, consistent brand that gave an early-stage startup a real presence: a logo, a palette, and a full set of pitch materials that let the founders walk into a room looking like a company worth funding. griffOworks didn't go on to launch as a funded product, but that wasn't the brief. The brief was to build something credible enough to try.
The thing I keep coming back to from this one is the contrast the brief was asking for. It wanted the company to feel corporate and trustworthy enough for investors and school districts, and at the same time playful and optimistic enough for teenagers. Those usually pull against each other, and the easy way out is to pick a side. The more interesting problem was getting both into the same brand without it feeling confused — and the logo was where that got solved first. Once the mark could hold the serious and the fun at the same time, the rest of the brand had somewhere to stand.
execution
execution
outcome
outcome
griffo presentation deck
griffo logo mark
