Over Thanksgiving in 2011, my uncle John and I got to talking about a business venture he was pursuing. He worked in HVAC, and he'd developed a product intended to help balance airflow throughout a home—especially older, two-floor homes with condensing units. John believed Air Wise could be the first product available directly to consumers to address the problem without the expense of hiring an HVAC company. I'd recently completed another brand identity project and was eager to do more, so I took a crack at developing one for him.

Most of my early concepts looked more or less like what you'd expect from an HVAC company—solid, traditional, and perhaps a little staid. But one direction went somewhere different. Inspired by the concentric circles of the device that would be installed inside the ductwork, I developed a colorful, circular mark that suggested the movement of air through heating and cooling. I liked it then, and I still do—particularly when I cropped the mark dramatically, leaving just a quarter of it visible in the corner of a business card or sheet of letterhead.

I'm not sure John and I ever had a proper conversation about the finished identity. The business didn't go anywhere, at least not that I'm aware of, and the work never made it into production.  When putting the project together for this website, I expanded my original stationery concept into a more complete collection of variations, mostly because it was fun to revisit something that never felt finished—and because I thought it would have been cool to produce the work this way.

Looking at it today, I can appreciate the design while recognizing how little thought I gave to what John was actually proposing. If Air Wise really was going to be the first consumer product of its kind, how would people even know they needed it? How would you introduce something they weren't accustomed to buying, much less installing themselves? These were questions I should have been asking. After all, I worked as a senior art director at an advertising agency that launched products for its clients. But I wasn't interested in all that. I just wanted to develop another brand identity.