Getting everyone at Davies Rourke and MMG together for the first time was a lot like a first date. We were all a little nervous and had lots of questions about the logistics of combining two companies. As we went around the table and introduced ourselves, we laughed and we learned about each other as individuals and the future of our agency. The more we understood, the more excited we became. We left that first meeting thinking, “This is going to work.”
Rather than jumping into the fun stuff like naming and logo design, first we took a step back. We developed a creative brief, just like we always do. We find that sometimes agencies forget this step because they know their business so well. We wanted to make sure that our new brand was rooted in the right strategy.
Our next challenge was to come up with a name for our new entity. Our solution was to leverage the equity in the name Davies – Ken Davies was Idaho’s original ad man – and combine it with the name Moore, as in our president and fearless leader, Edward Moore. We had tossed around other ideas before someone suggested DaviesMoore and when we heard it, it just felt like the right name because it perfectly communicates the idea of old and new. Once the name had been decided the next step was to come up with a logo and start making some decisions about the look and feel of our new company.
It was a truly collaborative process as the creatives at MMG and Davies Rourke sketched, brainstormed and explored visual solutions for our identity. As a group, we decided which ideas to throw out and which to continue to develop. In the end we had a couple of logo options that bore the fingerprints of the entire design team and we gathered the larger group to make the final decision. It wasn’t easy, but when the dust settled an early version of the logo you see on this page was decided upon.