A Kansas City engineering firm wanted to rebrand from a retired founder's name to a philosophy.
Role
Principal
Organization
Orange Flame Design
Larson Binkley was a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering firm in the KC Crossroads. The name was the two founders, the way a lot of engineering firms are named. When the founders retired, the firm wanted a name that said something about how it worked instead of who started it. The one they’d landed on was “dialectic.” Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The idea that you get to a better answer by putting two positions in tension.
They handed me an internal document called “Dialectic Management,” references to Hegel and Marx and Engels, and the film Helvetica as the thing that got them thinking about all this in the first place. The big idea, pulled straight from their internal thinking, was a single sentence.
Engineering lives in the world between.
Because the client was into the movie Helvetica, the type exploration started there. They wanted the cap height of the “D” to match the x-height of the rest of the word. That was the one rule.
Other logotype explorations came off the spiral diagram of the dialectic method, the one that shows thesis and antithesis winding up into synthesis and starting over. I mixed mechanical and organic shapes because the firm sits between the two, engineers who talk about egalitarianism and revolution and fluidity. But nothing was landing.
Chuck Close self-portrait, the reference the mark was built on.
Where it landed was Chuck Close. Somewhere in the back-and-forth his portraits came up, the ones built from a grid of small painted cells. Stand close and it’s a field of unrelated colored shapes. Step back and a face resolves out of it. So I created a Chuck Close “D,” a mosaic of hand-painted cells that reads as noise up close and as a letter from across the room. Drawn by hand, rough-edged where the clean type was smooth.
The rebrand came out at a party the firm threw to kick off Kansas City Design Week that year. A junior engineer at Dialectic created an 8-foot painting of the Close-inspired “D” for the wall, and she and I revealed the brand by unveiling the painting at the party.
The same “D” ran as a projection loop through the rest of the night, the painted cells shifting on the walls while people talked over drinks.
Dialectic is still Dialectic. The name held through the transition and through founder Chris Larson’s retirement, and the firm runs offices in Kansas City, Austin, and Denver now.
A food bank site from spec to comps. The whole thing started with untangling an information architecture where everyone was sure their page was the most important one.
