How Coalesce Delivers the Delightfully Unexpected
Members of the Coalesce team specializes in the “near impossible.” Images c/o Coalesce.
To find the digital product agency Coalesce, head down to Elizabeth Street in Chinatown and look for what has to be the last remaining DVD store in all of New York City. Open the unmarked door next to it to find what has to be the slowest elevator in all of Manhattan. But don’t let these surroundings fool you–the team at Coalesce is one of the sharpest and inventive out there. And they are our partner here at The Creative Factor, responsible for the new brand and visual identity.
As these things go, I made the connection to Coalesce through my daughter’s preschool when I met their product strategy partner Tucker Margulies. During playdates at Central Park, our daughters would run wild, and we’d discuss what we’re working on. That led to lunches with the full team, including Staton Piercey (co-founder), Naomi Piercey (product strategy partner) and Alex Severino (head of design). In addition to their regular client work–like designing Good Splits’s accounting tool that allows musicians easily calculate royalties from any music distributor–they were always doing the unexpected, such as creating Space Pigeon Propellant coffee, a “human-grade whole-bean espresso made with premier space-proof bean technology” which they sell to raise money for charities. With most studios, there is the idea you want and the one you don’t. With Coalesce, there is a third option–the idea you never saw coming, but are so glad to see.
Over the summer Coalesce developed The Creative Factor’s new look and feel. Call us biased, but we love it. It was the idea we never saw coming, but felt jazzed about when we did–the triad, the style, the vision. It captures The Creative Factor’s encouraging and witty voice. And it channels the ethos of our readers: brave, inspiring, and thought-provoking. Representing the combination of craft, career, and culture, our triad of creativity is a collection of triangles that, when collected in transparent layers, showcases how the creative process is unique to each individual. Coalesce built the triad to be utilized like building blocks. Each new layer is one step forward in the creative process, and each is connected to the last. There are vast possibilities with this approach, just like there are with every creative vision.
A peek inside The Creative Factor brand book.
Here, Naomi and Alex take us behind-the-scenes into the project and share how they find the right words to describe a brand, where the rabbit hole led them during the creative process, and what we can learn from Appalachian crafters about making great stuff (told you they deliver the unexpected).
What’s Coalesce’s secret sauce?
Alex: We have a wide range of backgrounds: journalism, marketing, history, fine art. Because of that we're a diverse group of creative problem solvers who approach problems differently.
Naomi: We were on a call the other day with a client and the client said, This sounds great, but if I work with you, who is the team, that is actually going to work on the product? When am I going to meet them? We said, We’re going to work with you—the folks on the call right now. Since we're small and do everything, you get the best people at the agency pitching you on the whole strategy and doing the actual project work, too.
The collaborative dynamic between you and Alex feels like you’ve got two bodies and one brain. True?
Naomi: Thanks, but I think we have different personalities. Alex fights for the visual storytelling and I fight for the content and tone from the writing side. We’re balancing it constantly. It is a noble joust, but you do need a knight on both sides.
Alex: I went to school for psychology–I wanted to be a therapist from age 12 to 22–and I am hyper-analytical. When we develop a brand, I develop a character in my mind of what that brand is–Naomi is so good at painting the picture of that character. I put a face to the brand and think: What is the personality of that entity?
Naomi and Alex photographed above Coalesce HQ in Chinatown.
Naomi, earlier you shared your unique approach to finding the right words to describe a brand. Tell us about your approach and why you used it.
Naomi: We have a number of different prompts and exercises in our branding workshop that helps us find the words together. We ask why something feels important. We sometimes describe the brand’s personality as a mash-up of our favorite movie characters. And we take diligent notes on the major themes that keep floating to the top of each conversation. But all of that still needs distilling. Because after it’s all out on the table, the goal is always to find the clearest, most memorable way of conveying the tone. I also read a lot of sci-fi novels (just finished the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixcin Liu) and listen to a lot of speculative fiction podcasts (Levar Burton Reads). If anyone knows how to explain complicated stuff in a captivating way, it’s those nerds.
I am often challenged to describe something in a new way. How do you create a unique character every time?
Naomi: I don't think you have to come up with something unique every time. Also, we don’t think of it as really building a new character, we’re just trying to define and differentiate a character that already exists. The work lies in finding a new way to show it. I think a brand is kind of like a pirate flag you have to fly. Distinct branding should quickly convey what you’re all about. Am I seeking treasure? Am I a friendly ship of dancers heading to Burning Man? Or am I actually going to steal all your stuff?
Coalesce team members work on their next big idea at the NYC office.
Coalesce specializes in the “near impossible.” Alex how do you think about the “near impossible” when you think about design and Naomi, the same for you for storytelling?
Naomi: Building a brand or rebranding can feel like an insurmountable task for a lot of people. I often tell new clients, if they know exactly what they want, they probably don’t need Coalesce. If they know kind of where they want to go, but not how to get there, that’s a great fit for our team because we can sherpa them down the path. Every maker needs a team that understands them at the end of the day. Good people that believe in your idea make the difficult things doable.
Alex: Failure is part of the design process and the persistence required can seem impossible at times. But I think the most rewarding design solutions are those that solve the toughest problems and we enjoy being consistently challenged.
Alex, when you designed The Creative Factor branding, you went down the rabbit hole on Paul Klee. What exactly about this Swiss-born German artist who died in 1940 made you feel he’s the perfect jumping off point for a publication about creativity in 2022?
Artist and educator Paul Klee and some of his works—organized chaos indeed.
Alex: Paul Klee is one of the fathers of abstract expressionism and he gets to the roots of visual communication. I'm analytical, and he's analytical. At the same time, he is also impulsive. Hyper-analysis followed by spontaneity. Organized chaos. The idea that, if you stand close to an elephant, you will only notice the individual parts. But if you stand back and look at the full animal, it’s a completely different thing.
Paul has these two very famous notebooks that were published after his death and they have always been two of my favorite sources of inspiration because you can look at the same page 100 times and see or feel something different every time. He was an impactful educator that believed creativity and imagination should determine the outcome even though he also had a highly technical understanding of visual form and how we perceive it.
He came to mind early in the exploratory phase, because, like The Creative Factor, he was curious and enjoyed sharing insights with the creative community. He pushed the boundaries of his craft, was dedicated to his career, and–wait for it–also dramatically impacted the creative culture of the time.
How did “organized chaos” translate to the TCF triad, a logo we never saw coming?
Alex: When we began considering ways to represent creativity as a skill you can hone, I did a (light) deep dive on the subject. Listening to the book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention made me think more deeply about the relationship between chaos and creativity, which reminded me of a Paul Klee diagram that depicts the relative order of chaos when viewed with a much broader perspective. The creative process can seem chaotic and unplanned when you’re immersed in it, but when you reach the finish line and zoom out, everything seems more intentional.
Sketches from “Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye (The Notebooks of Paul Klee)”.
We knew the primary ingredients for The Creative Factor content was “craft, career, and culture” and that recipe of three evolved into a triangle. But of course, one shape is never really the whole picture when it comes to creativity. Creativity is personal and unpredictable. We know the process of getting from A to B isn't ever a straight line, but it's often not easy to discern a thread of any kind. Sometimes the creative process comes out as layers and folds on top of the shape of your original idea.
Early-stage The Creative Factor sketches from the notebook of Barbara Cadorna.
But we do know creative skill takes practice and exposure. So we couldn't have a completely random concept. That's why we designed the TCF monogram with an underlying system to determine the construction of each letter. For all their sizes, shapes, and colors, each triangle still has to fit inside this mathematical system we built. As you increase the complexity of the letters and add animation, the effect becomes more and more turbulent. It’s elegant, organized chaos. And it was really, really fun to to put together.
The Creative Factor’s new animated logo.
One X-Factor in the process was your recent design hire from the School of Visual Arts, Barbara Cadorna, who sketched an outline of The Creative Factor triad during one of our calls. How did you come to hire her?
Alex: In the spring, I attended the industry day at School of Visual Arts. I was there for seven hours, and I talked to more than 100 students. After I got back to the office, I reviewed my notes and reached out to the best ones–I wrote dozens of emails and did dozens of calls and interviews. Barbara was a clear standout. Not only did her work show an advanced understanding of composition, type and image, I could instantly tell she was fully absorbed in the craft as a lifestyle, and not just as a day job. Her energy and passion for design stood out and she doesn’t shy away from technically-challenging tasks. It's not easy to find talented people who also fit into the ethos of our shop but she's a great fit. We’re lucky she decided to join the team.
Naomi, you’re a digital strategist, experiential event producer, camper van converter, space nut, and, at one time, the "Ask Her Anything" Sex and Relationship Columnist for Men's Health. How does this amazing creative breadth influence your work at Coalesce? Are you glad you have such a range, or do you ever wish you’d hyper-focused in one specific space?
Naomi: I often tell students that they shouldn’t worry so much about being a specialist in one field and focus more on becoming a generalist that can learn new skills along the way. The need for expertise isn’t going away but we are working in a time where we can’t see exactly what’s coming next. People aren’t staying in the same job for 30 years and then retiring. Being a faster learner makes adapting a lot easier. At the end of the day, if I’m writing an advice column, or creating live immersive NFT experiences, or running a branding workshop for a client, it’s still just creative storytelling for a unique group of fans. There’s a superfan for everything. You just have to find where yours are hiding out.
The team at Coalesce is driven by curiosity and passion. What’s on your radar these days?
Naomi: I love an enthusiast–people who are really into the thing they love doing. I don’t really care what it is. I love going to Comic Cons to see people creating costumes from scratch. I love attending one-woman live theater shows (no matter how bad they are). And I enjoy a good expo–it doesn’t matter what they’re selling. When people love what they do, they put a lot of care into how they do it and it shows. And authenticity like that is contagious.
I come from a long line of Appalachian quilters. My grandmother and my aunts have been creating these intricate scrap quilts from old flour sacks and used clothing for as long as I could remember. These blankets are works of art when it comes to their color and contrast and composition, but many of these women wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves “creative” individuals, which is a shame. This kind of handiwork requires resourcefulness and focus and imagination, just like any other craft. But there are a lot of people out there making something worthwhile who don’t consider themselves “creatives.” Creativity isn’t always in your job title. And that concept kept coming back to me as we were building out The Creative Factor brand.
Alex: The quality of art and design you can discover scrolling through Instagram today is unlike anything in the history of art. For all its flaws, the smart phone and social media has lead to a golden age of art and design. I went a number of years without sharing much of my personal or professional work on social media. As a result, I have a giant backlog of highly varied art and design projects I've created that have never seen the light of day. Barbara and I created a whiteboard competition to encourage the sharing of our work, both personal and professional. You can see if I'm keeping up my end of the bargain at @weathermannn or how Barbara is winning @barbs.zip.
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