Over the many years since its inception, the NASA SBIR/STTR program never had a fully established brand and often used materials with both inconsistent design and messaging, despite being a part of arguably one of the most well-branded government agencies. My challenge was to develop a unified brand voice and recognizable appearance of this NASA department that connected to the main NASA brand but still established NASA SBIR/STTR as its own unique area of this agency.

In my experience, consistency is the most important principle of branding next to differentiation. In fact, I believe brand consistency is the secret to brand success. It is essential to continually use things like color choice, typography, layout, and styles on a consistent basis in order to establish a relationship between these things and your brand. With enough repetition, the brand is then ingrained in the customer’s mind, preferably linked to things that matter to them. In the case of NASA SBIR/STTR, I followed this concept by maintaining the primary NASA blue color while adding complimentary colors unique to the program. I developed modern rocket illustrations that clearly linked to NASA’s mission, but were a more lighthearted take on NASA’s generally classic style.

In particular, I developed event branding for the 2016, 2017 and 2018 annual SBIR Industry Day. This two-day event, hosted by the NASA SBIR program at NASA’s Ames HQ in San Jose, California and Aurora, Colorado, attracted hundreds of innovators from across the nation looking for funding from NASA. I designed a conference booth, banners, TV messaging, and other collateral that was used as the brand for the event. Employees of NASA praised the designs and event brand as having “transformed” the event and venue by leaps and bounds compared to previous years.

 

 

Newsletter

I also created the NASA SBIR/STTR newsletter, “The Concept”, for both digital and print release. Sent quarterly, this newsletter provides information of interest to awardees of funding from NASA SBIR/STTR, SBCs, universities, and high-tech industrial communities.

 

Event Branding

 

Conference booth

 

 

Independent roll-up banners that also work well together

 

 

Timing presenters