The Ztories Brand Promise is: "We help public institutions deliver credible and persuasive images of their people and stories to the audiences they want to reach."
To convey that promise in a single icon wasn't easy. After a lot of reflection, we settled on cave painting as the perfect motif, because it represents the earliest expressions of human storytelling... and therefore communicates both the relevance of the storytelling impulse and the irrelevance of a particular technology. We seek to be technologically facile; but to recognize the importance of the message above the medium.
The figure in our logo comes from an ancient Algerian cave painting of a hunting expedition....
perhaps 4000 B.C. It shows an athletic runner, watching his backside. Is a mastodon or lion bearing down? Feel free to use it as the starting point in your next Caveman screenplay! The photo of the ancient cave art was taken by James Davis/Axiom and you can see it here. We placed this figure against a circular motif that for us symbolized the cave opening -- the public entrance that allowed light to enter and illuminate the personal story portrayed on its walls. The "cave opening" that sheds light on today's stories is of course the lens, and the whole range of media which carry today's multi-sensory communications.
The Ztories brand represents a spectrum of deliverables from branding to cinema to the web. Research, identity formation, integrated marketing, print, photography, web user interfaces, word-smithing, interviewing, editing, presentation, distribution ... all culminating in a gathering around your fire. It's your opportunity to bring your stories before your community, with illustrations on your cave wall. It can involve the growth or the narrowing of your audience. Whether it ends up in print or on the internet, in a DVD or an email or a postcard, Ztories will distil your brand, and allow it to emerge organically, persuasively, wholistically.
Owen Richard Kindig on the Ztories Brand: "I think our value to clients comes from the fact that we focus on authenticity ... a balance of bottom-line practicality and artistic excellence. Personally, I'm an artist. Brent's an artist. Institutions need to hire an artist, because only an artist can internalize their stories, and express them with soul and pathos. But Ztories as a brand is not about artistic self-expression. It's about the stories we paint — your stories — expressions of the institutional personality we reflect. Our canvas is broad, organic, and public, and so at Ztories, everyone is committed, not to self-expression, but to the communication of a truthful insight regarding the organizations we serve. Our goal is to be edgy-but-balanced, broad-but-nuanced, relevant but-not-capricious, dramatic but-not-artificial."
That's the Ztories brand promise to you.