ShiftFWD: Brand Strategy & Design for Visionary Clients

ShiftFWD was a boutique creative agency I co-founded with my former partner, dedicated to helping visionary businesses clarify their identities and bring their brands to life with strategy, storytelling, and design. Over the years, we collaborated with a wide range of mission-driven clients—from wellness clinics to creative professionals—offering deeply strategic, human-centered branding systems and digital experiences.

The challenge: Build an agency brand and methodology that would resonate with clients seeking thoughtful, purpose-driven design—while also serving as a functional and inspiring platform to showcase our own approach.

Key goals:

• Develop a clear, intentional brand identity and voice for the agency itself.
• Create a highly usable and visually striking website to showcase our work.
• Establish a portfolio system that reflected our deep strategic thinking and creativity.
• Make our process approachable, but meaningful, to foster trust with potential clients.

As designers and strategists, we knew we needed more than just “a nice logo” for ShiftFWD. Our clients came to us for clarity, empathy, and vision—so our own brand had to reflect those values. This meant distilling our personal and professional values into something structured and sustainable that could attract the right kind of clients.

Key considerations:

• How do we tell our own story while keeping the focus on the client?
• How do we translate the richness of our process into something that feels approachable?
• How do we balance creativity with clarity in our messaging?

We treated ourselves like a client—something we always recommend but few creatives actually do—and worked through a full strategy process before ever opening a design file.

We positioned ShiftFWD as a partner to those doing meaningful work, with a focus on brand clarity and deep creative collaboration. Our name, ShiftFWD, captured the essence of what we helped clients do: move forward with purpose and intention.

• Tone and voice: Conversational but confident—grounded in clarity, not jargon.
• Visual identity: Clean, modern typography with a neutral but warm palette that could easily adapt to highlight our diverse client work.
• Messaging framework: Structured to center the client’s transformation story—not just deliverables.

We also developed our ID Discovery Process, a proprietary framework we used to uncover each client’s core identity and translate it into visual, verbal, and strategic components.

As we built the ShiftFWD brand, we focused on alignment between form and function: the visual and experiential layers of the brand had to match our strategic depth.

Website design highlights:

• Clean layout with editorial-style case studies that gave space for storytelling.
• User-friendly structure with strong calls to action and clear segmentation of services.
• A flexible CMS that allowed us to update and expand as we grew.

Portfolio and storytelling:

Our case studies were designed to go beyond “before-and-after” snapshots. They walked visitors through the client's problem, the strategy behind the solution, and the outcome—backed by strong visuals and authentic narratives.

See an example: Branding and Identity for Storybook Creative Agency

Collaboration tools:

We developed visual brief templates, discovery worksheets, and presentation decks that became central to our client process. These tools made collaboration smoother and helped clients feel seen and understood.

The result was a brand and agency identity that felt cohesive, creative, and intentional—one that allowed us to attract values-aligned clients who appreciated our process as much as the final designs.

Deliverables included:

• Full brand identity and guidelines for ShiftFWD
• Website design and front-end development
• Portfolio system and project case studies
• Process documentation and client onboarding materials
• Social and promotional templates

Over the years, ShiftFWD worked with dozens of clients, many of whom came back for additional projects or referred others. Our approach helped creative entrepreneurs, wellness professionals, educational institutions, and digital brands bring their vision to life in a way that felt strategic and soulful.

Notable outcomes:

• Built long-term partnerships with clients like Watershed Wellness, Nathalie Lussier Media, and Storybook Creative.
• Received client feedback that consistently praised the clarity and transformation they felt after going through our process.
• Created a brand that felt like home—for both us and our clients.

Co-founding ShiftFWD gave me the opportunity to blend product design, strategy, and storytelling in a deeply collaborative way. It taught me the importance of building systems, not just deliverables—and how transformative design can be when rooted in empathy and intention.

Key takeaways:

• Start with clarity. Strategy makes the design stronger and more sustainable.
• A good process builds trust—it’s just as valuable as the final product.
• Branding is emotional work. The best results come from working with clients who are ready to go deep.

ShiftFWD remains a meaningful chapter in my career—one that shaped how I think about branding, collaboration, and purpose-driven design.