At AvreaFoster, our guiding principle is to bring clarity to the complex. We help clients in the most complex of industries align their leadership strategies, better engage business prospects and transform employee culture — and we use the power of design to accomplish those goals.
Senior Vice President of Creative Lisa Goin employs a design philosophy she’s honed over her 13 years at AvreaFoster and three decades in the industry. Below, she shares her creative vision and approach.
What drives the creative process at AvreaFoster and how is it different than other agencies?
To help us bring clarity to the complex, we draw on what we call our ‘three uniques.’ These are our three core attributes that define us as a brand consultancy. They are: Consultant Mindset, Brand Driven and Design Forward. Consistently practicing these qualities makes us different from other agencies and creative firms and enables us to do our best work. There may be design firms that check the creative box but don’t have the strategic chops. Or there may be a business consultancy with a team of strategists but no one to build a brand or bring it to life in real-world deliverables, like a website or sales strategy. We can do all three. It’s that combination that makes us unique.
Tell us more about the company’s design-forward philosophy?
Design Forward means approaching our work with a designer’s eye and through a strategic lens. In short, it means using design to craft compelling stories that help solve our clients’ business challenges and connect them with their customers. It’s an approach forged from a combination of our experiences, talents and our innate design sensibilities. When applied across all disciplines — not just creative, but strategy and account service — it lets us dig deeper and achieve better results. It something that’s really unique to AvreaFoster — a specialized skill that we’ve perfected over time.
Design Forward means approaching our work with a designer’s eye and through a strategic lens.
Our goal every day is to take basic brand deliverables — be it a company logo, a pitch deck or a corporate website — and boil it down to its simplest form to bring clarity to the business. We believe everything must have a purpose, less is more, simpler is better. Ultimately, clarity is our goal.
Where do you draw creative inspiration?
When it comes to inspiration, I don’t limit myself to graphic design sources alone. I pull inspiration from all creative arenas, including architecture, product design, landscape architecture, fashion, music and the fine arts. Anything that’s aesthetically stimulating or communicates a concise message using clever cues — that’s what inspires me. It’s important as creative people to find inspiration outside your industry. That’s where the best ideas come from.
One example would be a logo design project for a large real estate developer. The client brought in a regional map with outlines tracing the boundaries of their property developments, and the resulting shapes resembled a series of bird feathers. Inspired, I worked to incorporate stylized feathers into the client’s logo design. The final product embodied the spirit of innovation that transformed a region, giving flight to new business opportunities and economic prosperity.
How do you incorporate design into the greater creative process?
We spend quality time in Discovery becoming experts about our client’s company, services and their customers’ needs.
Our team listens and works hard to understand our clients’ business and industry contexts. We’re not one of those creative firms that just scratches the surface and shows you pretty designs. We spend quality time in Discovery becoming experts about our client’s company, services and their customers’ needs. I’ve been on factory floors. I’ve toured hospitals. I’ve been on construction sites — all to get to know our clients better. We become as an extension of their team, but also as an objective, third-party observer that can help them craft a clear plan of action. We take their audiences into consideration — thinking about how they engage and interact with our client’s brands.
How does the rest of the company support your design efforts?
We cannot achieve our high standard of output without the superbly talented team at AvreaFoster. They are passionate about our philosophy, live it and breathe it, and are motivated by it. We feed off each other’s creativity and push ourselves to be better and smarter for our clients. We do this without ego, collaborating selflessly to reach greater results.
It’s wonderful when everyone is working in unison toward the same goals and vision for our clients, and it’s so rewarding when our clients keep coming back to us because of the quality of our work and creative thinking.
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