Design Portfolio

County Line Collision Center

Story: County Line Collision Center is a highly-successful automotive body restoration shop located east of Pittsburgh. When I first sat down with the general manager of County Line Collision Center, he expressed some concern about his company's marketing strategy. Desite incredibly high customer satisfaction ratings (consistently 98% or better for several years), he was concerned about making sure his shop was top-of-mind when someone was in the unfortunate position of needing his services. He was very specific about his needs -- he believed that his best growth opportunity was through the web and simply wanted a site that could provide the right information for potential customers. When I asked if he had any logo or identity, he handed me his business card, which included nothing more than plain text.

Sitting down to start the project, my mind was blank. I couldn't come up with an adequate design that had any sort of life to it, which simply wouldn't work given his competition and the market County Line Collision Center served. I decided to attempt to develop an identity around which the web site could be built.

Challenge: The web site design, if it were to have any impact, needed to have a unified brand theme. Unfortunately, there was nothing on which I could base the design. I decided to go against the client's first request and proceed with developing a logo design in the hopes that it could be integrated to the final web site. This was a bit of a risky move given that the general manager didn't seem to think this was needed.

Goal: Develop an identity that was strong enough that, not only would work for the market in which County Line Collision Center competed, but also impressed the general manager enough to make it a part of his overall marketing effort.

Solution: Because the company was often referred to as "County Line", I felt like the logo needed to make it obvious that the company worked in the automobile industry by including graphical elements that reinforced that message. In addition, the logo needed to focus on the quality of the finished product since many body shops focus on the accident/damage. Finally, the colors needed to be unoffensive and inexpensive to reproduce in both one color and two-color.

Nervous when presenting the finished logo design, the general manager was thrilled. He immediately had business cards reprinted to incorporate the logo into the design. Shortly after the logo presentation, the web site went live.