An industrial brand meant to keep sailors safe, dry, and locatable in the event of emergency.
Well, you may not think that something as ordinary as what color you wear matters. And, if you're at home or work in an office, you're probably right. But, for commercial fishermen, wearing something that helps them be more visible on the stormy black sea can be a matter of life and death.
At 117 deaths per 100,000 workers, Commercial Fishing has the 2nd highest fatalities of all other jobs in the U.S., compared to the national average of 4 per 100,000.
Otherwise, the remaining 51% majority of fatalities occurred due to other conditions:
Of these falls overboard, 1/2 of them are not witnessed, meaning sailors fall overboard and subsequently are never seen again.
That's what Backstay was designed with in mind.
It's a waterproof, insulated wetsuit & windbreaker combination, with integrated technologies such as tracking, waterproof lights, and floatation, to improve the lives of high-exposure workers, specifically commercial fishermen.
In order to properly develop a concept, you have to know the concept better than anyone else, before you can then communicate it.
There's a way of describing the intangible aspects of the feelings one gets from any brand: the brand voice.
Backstay's brand voice is: Sustainable, Secure, Confident in the Eye of the Storm.
After that, the next step is to start on a symbolic representation that matches. Backstay's logo started with rough marine symbols, and after continuous feedback, were refined down into their current simplest forms.
After initial branding processes, the next step is to ground the idea in reality in some tangible way.
Our path for this with Backstay was to develop designs for the actual product itself, which is the safety suit a deep sea fisherman would wear to increase visibility and safety.
This, as with everything else in a designer's life, begins with sketching.
We decided to use the 3D rendering software Blender to help better visualize the product and brand in-context.
The software uses virtual sculpting and shapes combined with a realistic materials and lighting simulation to provide a semi-real interpretation of the brand and product.
Backstay was exploratory for us in the use of 3D animation software to visualize a professional/consumer product to serve brand purposes. We've used the same techniques in later products, but this was the initial experience for us. It's always refreshing to try a new strategy of visualizing branding for a product or business.
