
FINterview Series: Chiao Huang

The Fins! Insanely talented, down to earth good people, talk about a dream team!
Fresh Mexican food – one of the many reasons I love living in San Diego!
Most weekends you can find me checking out a brewery with friends, flying home to wine country to see family, heading to dog beach with my puppy, Tucker, or at the ballpark for a Padres game!
Shoe Dog. I’ve played sports my entire life and Nike has always been a staple in that. Aside from my lifelong connection with Nike, I enjoyed reading the story behind the brand – guess I can thank “Just Do It” for fueling my love for branding!
With more businesses moving their teams completely remote after COVID-19, maintaining a unified team presence is becoming increasingly difficult for companies and organizations.
If company-wide professional headshots were never taken for your team, all you have would be a handful of photos of faces that were taken at different times with various lighting, cameras, positions, styles, and resolutions. Put them side by side in a presentation, proposal or on your brand new website and they will look like they are freshly pulled out of Google. This could have a negative influence on your company credibility.
While it is more expensive and time-consuming to hire photographers in each location and get on the same page regarding the style, companies have an opportunity to think creatively about how to tackle this issue.
Here at Four Fin, we have come up with some creative solutions that help our clients present their complete remote team with a look of professionalism and coherence.
Seismic is a PR firm with team members spread across the US. As they prepared to launch their new website with a shiny new brand, team headshots needed to be freshened as well. We helped Seismic put together a photoshoot at their post-Covid, in-person team-wide retreat. This gave the majority of the team a unified look. However, not everyone could attend the event, so we also accounted for future additions, by shooting them on a clean white background.
Benefits of this approach:
Benhamou Global Ventures is a remote team spread across the globe through different time zones. The leadership team, who needed to be showcased on the website, faced the challenge of not having the capacity or time to take a new headshot.
If you find yourself in a similar circumstance, a nice way to still achieve a coherent team look is to enhance the graphic treatment for the photos. However, this method does require more production work.
Benefits of this approach:
If the solutions we mentioned above don’t solve for your specific case, there are some additional options to try:
Like we mentioned above for the Seismic team, any physical team building event is a great opportunity to gather everyone’s headshot. Pick a place you enjoy, and make an appointment with a great local photographer, communicate the style and you’re good to go.
A style guide provides tips and guidelines for headshots that help both team members and photographers achieve a consistent look. By defining width and height, resolution, clothes to wear, backgrounds, lighting, postures, etc, you can easily yield workable results.
If all you are looking to do is improve the headshots you’ve collected from the team, and there’s not much time or resources to be creative, consider using a paid service like Heroic Headshots, that automatically generates the headshots to align with your brand, in a few easy steps.
We hope this gets you started on creating consistent team headshots. Nowadays with smartphones, we can easily take high-res photos that are good enough for any digital presentation. With the right creative strategies, you’ll find it easy to improve the quality and unity of your team shots, and leave a great first digital impression of your team.
Still need help? Reach out!
I wanted to be President. My hand was perpetually raised in school, volunteering for anything that would get me out of my seat and into a new experience.
l always stop to watch Denzel’s portrayal of Frank Lucas in American Gangster. He built community and gave his family upward mobility which was all foiled by {spoiler alert} a full-length, $100k chinchilla coat.
Learning alongside other talented people who are also dedicated to great work – every time. The “get it right” culture prioritizes our clients needs. It energizes me daily.
Walking my sweet senior pups and catching stand-up comedy and live music with my husband, Erick. We went to the Sunset Bowl this autumn for our first live-show post Pandemic and it was magic.
Brands don’t always need to completely rework their identity to signal change or growth. A Brand Evolution (improving upon what’s existing) or a Brand Revolution (creating something completely new) is the lingo we use to describe what kind of brand solution clients embark on. Deciding on which solution is best for the brand depends on answering questions like:
Is our brand still relevant to our audiences/markets?
Has our business outgrown our existing brand?
Are there certain aspects of the brand (logo, colors, etc.) that resonate with stakeholders we need to keep?
To name a few…
Here are four clients that maintained existing visual equities, yet evolved their brands to keep up with their evolving businesses.
On the cusp of celebrating their five year anniversary and announcing major funding partnerships, Mission Driven Finance was looking to clean up before these big milestones. MDF tells a great story their brand evolution on their blog here.
GIA had been a well-known brand in wellness consulting circles, but in shifting to a more Direct-to-Consumer model, they needed a fresh take on their visual identity beyond the logo. We partnered with GIA to make a subtle, yet impactful, refresh to the brand’s web and packaging consumer experiences.
After developing the brand for Unfold Development, CEG’s newest division, the 30-year-old company was ready for change. The updated visual identity incorporates graphical elements kindred to Unfold while maintaining its typographic roots.
CPA Collective provides high-caliber accounting solutions and needed its brand to meet the same level of quality that the business provides. The evolved, refreshed visual identity and website express a more tasteful, experienced CPA Collective.
Are you considering an uplevel to your brand identity, but not sure if a brand evolution is the solution?