The Marathon Initiative
The Marathon Initiative is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research organization. It is funded by private individuals and foundations, as well as by grants from or contract work for the U.S. Government.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Vanguard Ideation was recruited to help develop a brand identity and website for the organization to visually showcase the business. Marathon wanted to display all of their related works including articles, publications, video interviews and other media in a streamlined feed of information to better showcase all of the different works.
PROCESS
The process involved finding iconography that resembled something classical and related back to history. The client’s philosophy is to monitor how history behaved over time and how we can learn from that from a foreign policy perspective. Using imagery of ancient war, something from the 17th or 18th century was a starting point before deciding on this particular helmet look for the brand. It was something modern and simplistic that encapsulated the idea of the organization.
Once the brand was established we continued to develop the aesthetic of the brand. The client wanted something not too harsh of a color scheme. They wanted something that had a minimal amount of color but had a hint of character to the look. Compiling images and design ideas for the websites was a challenge to nail down so many different decades that made everything look very unified. Using black and white photos with accents of dark blue and cream really helped strengthen the aesthetic that was palletable
A lot of the other challenges included putting together all of the different articles, videos, and news clippings together into blog posts to help centralize the work that Bridge and Wess worked on to build a better portfolio. Using WordPress helped make an efficient system to publishing content frequently.