Inspired, disciplined creativity
/ As seasoned designers based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jeanette Karthaus and Michael Collins work together to create simple, evocative brand identities for established and emerging brands on a national and global scale.
Jeanette Karthaus
Jeanette is a highly skilled designer and former brand agency account manager, whose talent and sensibilities translate beautifully on every component of a brand identity program. Her background on both the client and consultant side is invaluable to companies undertaking brand change, and her day-to-day management skills are a tremendous asset. As an independent consultant she worked for the brand firms TrueBrand and MetaDesign. In her roles as senior designer she worked for Chronicle Books, as well as for the University of Phoenix on a fully integrated, multi-faceted brand identity program that won a Re-brand Award of Distinction.
Jeanette holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Art, San Francisco.
Michael Collins
Michael has a thorough knowledge of the creative process and integrated brand identity programs including complex, multi-faced design systems and a love of logo design as evidenced by the many identities he has created for corporations and institutions. As a lead designer and project manager, he worked at the brand firms Landor Associates (San Francisco and London), Luxon Carrà and TrueBrand, and as an independent creative consultant on significant brand identity programs on a national and global scale.
Michael holds a BFA with Honors from the Art Center College of Design.
Commitment
/ Our client experience and creative work represents a wide, diverse range of enterprise products, services and activities. With each engagement we immerse ourselves deeply into our client’s unique inner culture, their audience and their message. We don’t necessarily specialize in any one industry — we do strive to create fresh solutions that stand apart in our client’s field of business. But what all our clients share is a passionate brand vision and a personal commitment to ‘get it right’.
Our clients
Corporate + Institutional visionaries
Marketing directors
Branding identity scenarios we address
New ground-up
Rebrand
Refresh
Extension
Our strategic partners
Brand strategists
Brand + naming agencies
Internal + agency creative directors
PR agencies
Our core offerings
Brand visual audit + recommendations
Logo design + refresh
Brand architecture + co-branding
Brand look + feel and integrated design systems
Brand look + feel refresh
Brand rollout materials
Targeted communications
Brand guidelines + training
Event branding
Our combined experience includes:
B2B
Ampere Computing
EPIC Insurance Brokers
Fulagai Investment Bank
Asset Management Ventures
Chromalloy
Landmark Aviation
Coherent, Inc.
Standard Aero
TW Telecom
Dell
CoreSite
Linkbit
Nexcelle
Hamilton-Hunter Business Park
Technicolor
B2C
LG
Tesoro Retail Petroleum
Shell
Chefsbest.org
NWA Northwest Airlines
US Airways
Bridgestone
Farmland Foods
Natural Wonders
Fresh Pride
Cnet
Education/Healthcare/
Foundation
Education/
Healthcare/
Foundation
UCSF University of California San Francisco
Lucile Packard Foundation for Childrenʼs Health Stanford
Stanford University
University of Phoenix
Make-A-Wish Foundation
Golden State Warriors Community Foundation
Life Technologies
Vortran Medical Technology
Senn Delaney
Cigna
Public Facing
FAA–Federal Aviation Administration
1996 Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games
Expo ʼ92, Seville Spain
Praise from our clients and partners:
As a privately owned investment bank, our founder desired a unique, forceful image based on western iconography that would distinguish us in the Asian financial marketplace as we lead our Taiwanese based clients into the China securities market. Based on their proven experience creating simple, memorable logos and their sensitivity to complex corporate and cultural issues, we trusted them with our brand identity program. Jeanette and Michael were highly professional, responsive and methodical at every step of the creative process. Subsequently we engaged them to design the brand identity for our private foundation supporting small Taiwanese farmers and organic agriculture. I highly recommend them.
I had the privilege to collaborate with Jeanette and Michael on a very complex brand identity architecture extension for UCSF. The challenge was to develop a comprehensive strategy, design system and guidelines for local to global partnerships, joint ventures, affiliations, programs and initiatives. The goal was to consistently configure identity-lockups, cobranding, descriptors, tag lines and straplines to align with the new brand identity standards. Once we completed a comprehensive decision tree model establishing new rules, Jeanette and Michael embarked on an exhaustive design exploration translating relationship between communication requirements and the visual and verbal hierarchy. They crafted beautifully simple design solutions that accommodated virtually every conceivable scenario. I cannot recommend Jeanette and Michael enough, they are strategic, creative, practical, thorough and passionate about their client’s work.
Inspired, disciplined creativity. I know it sounds a bit oxymoronic but most clients place a high value on this when it comes to their brand identity. And itʼs exactly what Michael and Jeanette deliver. Iʼve had the pleasure of working with this talented team for many years, on many of the projects in their portfolio and I can assure you they get it right. They understand how to apply strategic thinking and direction to the creative process while bringing fresh and unexpected yet always relevant ideas to the table. The end result is evocative design and enduring identities for brands. I highly recommend Michael and Jeanette; theyʼre simply great.
The Karthaus-Collins team, Jeanette and Michael, were instrumental in the success of my two international brand identity companies, Luxon Carrà and TrueBrand. They both create beautiful and inventive solutions to branding problems. What makes them special is their ability evaluate the creative output in terms of strategic definition of a brands essence, and to them insure the solutions work functionality across multiple media expressions. They are smart, hardworking and easy to work with. I highly recommend them.
Jeanette and Michael helped us through a major re-branding effort, focusing on our visual brand identity and culminating in a comprehensive, cohesive redesign of EPIC’s design system and standards. Across the months we worked together they were responsive, reliable and talented; offering interesting and creative ideas, a strong design aesthetic and practical, cost-effective suggestions and solutions. Plus they are both wonderful people, who were a lot of fun to work with. I would recommend Jeanette and Michael without reservation. They were terrific partners to my team and to EPIC.