Sound Mind Creative

Jenny Fares

A creative force to be reckoned with, Jenny Fares has been an active player in Asheville’s artistic community for nearly thirteen years. Jenny is a mover, shaker, and all around crowd rouser. Her collaborations are a walloping cacophony of sound and fury, art and fun. She thrives in creative, energetic circles – and it shows.

 Jenny started her career working for some of Atlanta’s top ad agencies, designing for Coca-Cola, M&M, Mars and UPS. She left the big city for the relaxed pace of Asheville in 2002, and worked at the Brite Agency for two years before opening Sound Mind Creative in 2004. While building a national client base, Jenny collaborated with a handful of Asheville’s rising agencies. In 2010, Jenny moved to her current studio in the River Arts District. She was honored to be named Best of Graphic Design in WNC by Mountain Xpress readers in 2012 and 2013. She was honored in 2016 to move her studio into the Refinery Creator space in the exciting downtown South Slope neighborhood.

 With a personal battle cry, “Power to the People!”, Jenny’s humanitarian efforts reflect her creative, playful heart – benefiting the good people of Asheville in countless ways. She was very recently featured on the cover of Asheville Citizen-Times for creating a “legacy of innovative music programming” for the city. She founded and ran Music Video Asheville for 5 years and the Brown Bag Songwriting Competition. A staunch supporter of the design and creative community in Asheville, in 2016 she organized a wildly successful eight month series on collaboration with the Asheville Design Salon monthly topics include web development, illustration, film and social media.

Jenny’s community, fitness, and environmental offerings are equally respectable. This past fall she organized the Run Sing Thing to benefit a 5k singalong fun run for Arts For Life. Currently, she serves on the advisory board for Creative Mornings Asheville. As President of Bent Creek Community Park board 2013,  Jenny helped organized an event that raised $10,000 for the county-owned park. In the same year, she served on the board of the River Arts District Business Association (RADBA), leading a branding workshop for the RAD and street clean up projects. In addition to being a rocking designer, illustrator, trail runner, environmentalist, event planner, and avid wig collector, she’s often covered in paint and glitter glue from a new art project. As the former lead singer of Asheville folk favorite, Jen and the Juice, she headlined area festivals including LAAFF and Downtown After Five, and the band’s record Meet the Hooligans of Bohemia was named among the top 10 regional albums of 2006 by 88.7 WNCW. In 2008, Jen and the Juice’s band cd was voted in the top 10 by WNCW readers. Today, Jenny enjoys her first baby, Layla Fares born February 2016.

We’d like to know how we can help you.

Please email us to arrange a phone meeting to discuss your project and needs. From there, we’ll send you a proposal and estimate, usually within 48 hours. A second conversation is sometimes in order to answer any questions regarding the quote and proposal. Once you have decided to hire us, we will set up a creative meeting with you and collect a deposit.

Creative Meeting

We love the creative process and have fun with it – though it really is serious business. In order to serve you, we must get to know you. We want you to feel relaxed and at ease in our care. We’ll take this time to ask questions, understand the ins-and-outs of your organization – earnestly listening to your needs, wants, and desires in doing business. We’ll ask who your competition is. We will also want to know about your audience – who are they and what’s their perception of you? We ask a lot of probing questions because it’s important we get to know you. Rest assured, your secrets are safe. Confidentiality holds true – even in branding.

Brainstorm Treatment

Creative brainstorming is often the most fun part of the process. Sound Mind Creative pulls from our years of experience helping businesses choose a target and construct what we call “a creative box.” This is where we work together to understand your creative parameters and restrictions – as well as our creative freedom with your project. We believe this is an important step. One that fosters that special “magic” that makes our clients so happy.

Timing

We will discuss timelines, determining when you should expect deliverables in order to reach your goals. From our experience in carrying out work and partnering with printers, developers, writers, photographers, and videographers – we know how long projects take. We’ll support you in setting a realistic schedule.

For larger organizations with stakeholders, Sound Mind Creative offers an effective Branding Workshop to help get all the bricks laid for a strong buy-in from the group. We will provide invigorating branding and messaging, giving your organization the image makeover it needs in order to achieve this.

In summary, we take all the information we gather from you and conduct creative and market research to produce a fresh approach you can be proud of. We find that our clients enjoy working with us and love all we create. Take comfort knowing the hardest part will be deciding which creative direction you like best.

You need to get things done.

Sound Mind Creative takes a proactive roll – establishing timelines, meeting deadlines, communicating project successes and snags and delivering a quality finished product to the client. Yielding long term, successful results, our method incorporates an ideal sequence of activities-phases, steps and milestones. This process offers a framework for planning and managing projects – thereby allowing us to produce our best work. Jenny Fares, the primary contact on this proposal, aims to work directly with key stakeholders and the marketing team to produce timely results. Sound Mind Creative uses a proven design process and we are here to help.

You know your company better than anyone.

Our job is to listen, learn, interpret and distill. With more than 10 years industry experience, Sound Mind Creative builds upon the inside knowledge our clients possess to create effective campaigns and garner real results.

• We get to know every detail of your brand.

• We help you discover your strengths and capitalize on them.

• We demonstrate the solidity of your brand in the marketplace.

• We create a strategy for your brand that transcends costs, benefits and features and speaks directly to your customers.

In building memorable brand identity systems from the ground up, we have developed strong client relationships. These positive interactions allow us to guide projects from start to finish. We have helped launch new brands and breathed new life into existing ones. We have worked with local, national and international companies to create smart, beautiful, and precisely targeted communications that work.

Branding

With a background in working with the brand standards of corporations like Coca-Cola, M&M Mars, and UPS, we are schooled veterans of the brand building process. We are really good at creating brands from the ground up, reinventing brands, and working inside existing design standards. Basically, we are experts at building and maintaining vibrant design systems, meaning we understand the power of visual consistency and the details of that are fonts, colors, photography, words and so much more. We create multi-page Graphic Design Standards documents that allow the look of a business brand identity/look to be replicated across print and web media, simply everything your company makes graphically matches (ex. your brochure matches your web site) and our standards manuals are rules. We can not only come up with meaningful design that tells a story in a direct way, we can also help you establish your brand voice through naming, messaging and brand purpose statements.

Your investment in a good brand design system will: reap design cost savings for years, make an excellent spring board for marketing campaigns and product launches, maximize market place impact with a consistent look and feel and most importantly give a personality to the goods and/or services your business has to offer.

Logos

Sound Mind has a reputation for designing great logos. Wowing our new and old clients with logo designs constantly, did not happen overnight. Experience has taught us how to read our clients minds and navigate the design process. Even in difficult situations with groups and passionate stakeholders we get the job done. We know not every client can afford a full brand system and marketing campaign design, and believe in the importance of a logo as the cornerstone of a good brand. We have no problem building all kinds of marketing materials from there.

Marketing Campaigns

Need a way to get the word out about a cause, event, product launch, new service announcement? We are specialists at designing campaign identities. Many times we create tradeshow graphics and marketing materials, posters, flyers direct mail, print and web ads and social media campaigns. We plan the materials we design based on desired results and advise clients on how and what to make and do. We also design things based on their function in the marketplace (ex. graphics for a billboard are treated differently than a web banner).

Web Design

As detail-oriented web designers, we insist on pixel-perfect front-end, responsive design that is executed to the brand standard. This includes: complex user interface elements, information architecture to content creation (seo driven copy and photography). Our hands-on project management and art direction make the task of creating complex and creative data-driven applications, games, or mobile apps seem easy. We’ve designed over 50 websites of every scale. We make the process fluid and easy for our clients. Sound Mind Creative outsources to web development teams to implement development in well-written, scalable code. We are confident and experienced – knowing exactly who to hire, and for which purpose. Our design team is also hired regularly by web firms for design.

Illustration

After receiving a Regional Artist Grant from the Asheville Arts Council in 2008, Jenny used that money to fuel the development of her illustration portfolio and she has never looked back. Her illustration career continues to gain steam as she is hired regularly by clients all over the country to illustrate images for books and publications, icons, info graphics, artwork for catalog covers and band and festival posters. Knowing how to bill can be difficult for many emerging artists, but Jenny works hard to deliver great work and keep projects on budget.

 

You want to work with the best.

Sound Mind Creative projects outsource elements from trusted vendors and partners – such as photography, copy editing or video production. This is business as usual, and we consider it a great service to our clients. For over a decade, we have developed and maintained working relationships with esteemed professionals. We believe in letting specialists specialize, and in pairing the right contractor with the right task.

In order to fulfill our responsibility seamlessly, we insist upon arranging and brokering all print and web development services. By taking accountability for all creative contributors and campaign elements, our clients reap the benefit of a full service, qualified team of professionals – without suffering big agency (big ticket) sticker shock. Why take chances working with new vendors? We know what works and what does not because we have been there. We can find the best printers to meet your budget and timeline, developers to build code, and so much more. We bring top photographers in from San Francisco and send ui development to international site builders, and also we love to empower and build the careers of local contractors and businesses.

Chameleons. Sound Mind is also comfortable performing inside design agencies and web firms as design and brand consultants. Years of experience in transparency and communication make Jenny a great freelance/ in house ally, when jobs get big ,or you need to a jolt to your internal design team’s creative juice.