The Pro&Tell Collective

Established by a group of local photographers and videographers, The Pro & Tell Collective was established in 2019. Their goal was to advocate for professionals in North Carolina, and create a new community to facilitate deeper connections and collaboration. Every year, they host a conference where creatives can have hands-on access to the latest equipment and hone their skills.

In North Carolina, photographers and videographers face a dilemma. Either hunker down and embrace their busiest time of the year (and largest source of revenue), or abandon it all in favor of attending the biggest conventions in their industry, where they hone their skills and stress test the latest equipment. They cannot do both.

The High Point Furniture Market is the gorilla in the room, and its biannual schedule aligns with the X and CineGear. Talent in the Triad area routinely misses them.

This challenge was met by a group of local professionals that decided to take matters into their own hands. The decision was made not only to establish a convention on their own terms, but to create a new creative community that could facilitate deeper connections and advocate for the regional industry to civic and business leadership.

With this objective in mind, they approached the Design Office of John Murph to develop comprehensive branding. This ranged from name development and logo design to a website and wayfinding signage for the annual conference.

With an audience comprised of professional photographers, videographers, and cinematographers, the organization's brand needed to appeal to a relatively sophisticated design sensibility.

It also needed to avoid imagery and visuals that strayed in any specific direction, in order to appeal to a broad variety of artists and craftspeople. A brand identity that catered too much to corporate photographers might alienate cinematographers, and vice versa. Instead, visuals would focus on colloquial associations with the industry and its place in North Carolina.

Finally, the brand needed to embody a degree of professional refinement in order to lend the community credibility as they invited exhibitors to undertake the time and expense in traveling to their annual conference to showcase their wares for attendees.

The Design Office Of John Murph created a comprehensive brand, from name development and logo design to a website and wayfinding signage. The final name played off of the community's effort to provide professionals an opportunity to benefit from a "show and tell" of the industry's key technology and equipment.

The brand story leveraged the eclectic gathering that the Pro & Tell Collective represented. Many different studios that were normally competitors came together to contribute to the effort to create the Collective’s first conference.

This spirit of coordination and industry collegiality inspired the brand’s visual language, with an almost quilt-like graphic swatch pattern that could be applied systematically regardless of the context.

The aforementioned quilt-like graphic pattern of the Pro&Tell branding was a composition of colorful blocks and symbols. These symbols ranged from fragments of the logo's abstract lightbulb to hints of the visual language of photography, like crop marks and focal point markers. Mixed in was a sampling of North Carolina-specific graphics like the state bird, a silhouette of the state, and a minimalist representation of the flag.

In certain contexts, the pattern was animated and coupled with the brand's central identity statement: "A Community of Creative Professionals Focused on Video and Photography Production, Centered in North Carolina."

The new brand provided evidence of credibility and authenticity to industry exhibitors when the group's leadership began reaching out to invite them to their first conference. All told, more than 20 exhibitors showed up, from Sony to Hasselblad to Zeiss. Pro&Tell considered it a success with more than 200 attendees, including photography students from around the state.

Unfortunately, the event wrapped up on the eve of COVID lockdowns, suppressing the conference leaders' efforts to follow up on the success. Subsequently, a second event scheduled one year later was scuttled by a last minute snow storm that shut down travel on top of lingering COVID concerns.