Coming Soon...

In 2021, we created a new "Communications Director" position at Equip Studio and hired Morgan Reynolds to help guide us into the next phase of our growth as a company. With a background in graphic design, marketing, and public relations, he immediately set out to guide us through a Brand identity refinement process.

In the early years, we were so excited to develop the business, that we hit the ground running with only the content Matthew had given us. We had asked him to design a logo, not a brand. We were given a handful of images and Illustrator files and we gave him a pretty good set of documents for his home. That was the last of our involvement with a professional graphic designer for the logo.

We began to implement the logo on all of our visual content. We developed proposals, a website, and business cards. There was no "brand" because we felt like we had a lot of work to do to earn the right to say we had one. (Plus, we were very, very busy!)

However, over time, a "brand" began to emerge organically and -after a few years- we had grown to a point that we felt like the time was right to solidify everything we had been developing into something official.

In late 2019, Sandy Gibbes and Jonathan Edens discussed the need to develop an Equip Studio Brand Guidelines document to memorialize the ways we had been using -and not using- the logo. The decision was made to appoint a capable team member to spearhead the effort. Madison Polk had been previously tasked with finalizing the work we had been doing on our Core Values icons, and we felt like -based on the results of that effort- she would be a great candidate to take on the role of developing the Guidelines for everything else. She agreed and began work on the development of a virtual document (in the form of this website) in 2020.

The first official Equip Studio Brand Guidelines were published and presented to the firm on June 22, 2020.

Matthew Smith presented us with a few options that none of us were particularly excited about. (You can imagine how difficult it would be to design for designers.) We realized that we needed to share with him some of our vision and a little more about the architectural process in general. He then took that knowledge, along with our feedback on his previous work, and came back to us a week later with what became our official logo.

As soon as we saw it, we knew it was right.

It had the right amount of personality, minimalism, and symbolism. We glanced around the table trying to read each other's reactions and decided to have a follow-up meeting between the five of us to discuss.

On April 7, 2014, we all agreed that Equip Studio finally had its first logo.

In the beginning, we had no money and only a couple of clients. We were starting to create proposals and presentations, and we knew we would need a logo very soon. It had taken us several hilarious weeks to settle on a name (the most famous alternative option we came up with was "Cosmic Space Design") and our efforts to design a logo ourselves (and with the help of Sandy's wife) had stalled. We knew we would need some "professional" help from an outsider to design a logo we could all agree on.

With no formal office space and two of our five original partners still transitioning away from a previous employer, we had been meeting over lunch in the shared conference room of a co-working space in downtown Greenville, SC. Sims Key had been leasing a desk there since returning to South Carolina (from California) to join his father, Randy Key, in the Florence-based Key Architecture. One of the other entrepreneurs in the co-working space was a graphic designer named Matthew Smith. Upon discovering that he was interested in design help for his residence, we struck a deal to  trade architectural services for graphic design.