Why do business with us?
idéemarque is a collective of high-powered, creative, and competent individuals who are dedicated to the pursuit of innovation.
We’re here to make your business stand out from the Sea of Sameness.
We help your business clarify and express your fundamental “raison d’être” with the combined powers of design and psychology.
As a result, we empower you to communicate your brand’s core message in a simple and differentiated way.
On this page you will discover:
- What idéemarque means
- Our work ethic, processes and tools
- The ways we give back to our communities
- The types of clients we like to work with
Keep calm and keep scrolling.
What’s up with the quirky & fancy name?
“idéemarque” comes from the combination of “idée” (idea) and “marque” (brand) in French, whose pronounciation also conveys the meaning “They (we) differentiate”. In English, we informally nickname ourselves “IDmark” to convey that your brand mark is, in practice, your organisation’s identity.
Local state law requires us to have a name that is registered in French. It’s sometimes possible to work around it, but we preferred to serve our clients than to jump through hoops or argue with the government. We can help you with that as we’ve done for some of our clients, though; we do know a thing or two about brand name regulations, trademarks and linguistic challenges you can face across jurisdictions when you expand internationally.
We don’t take ourselves seriously,
but we take your projects—and the quality of our work—very seriously.
Brand specialists who work for us are creative, fun, and professional. We all speak at least three languages. Usually within the same sentence.
We’re at our best when we help you communicate your raison d’être with panache and bon goût. And we’re not saying that just because we speak Old French, by the way.
Solid processes and equipment
The fact that we enjoy ourselves at work does not mean we’re sniffing glue and playing with crayons on a picnic table.- take copious amounts of extremely well-organised notes;
- use proven methods to channel our creative madness, including the idéemarque lean creative process;
- regularly ensure our computer monitors are color-calibrated using a spectrophotometer to ensure reliable and accurate results for your logos, visual identity gudelines, brochures, and other marketing collateral;
- use standardized formats;
- make regular backups of everything (we haven’t lost a single file in over fifteen years);
- encrypt our storage drives (including backups) to ensure the safety and confidentiality of your data, particularly when travelling;
- run our own dedicated web analytics server as a complementary alternative to Google Analytics;
- choose lasting tools and solutions that we (and your business) can depend on for decades, while continuing to monitor emerging technology trends.
Most agencies don’t do even a fraction of that. Our business management processes are second to none.
Making the world a beta better place
Open-source is part of our DNA, not some feel-good PR stunt.
We use and contribute to open source software daily. And we don’t mean “we have dumped some javascript library on github”. Through our work, we favor and empower open-source creativity & productivity software, particularly on the desktop.
We are regularly involved with dozens of free & open-source software projects behind the scenes, and we have been doing so for decades. This R&D is transparent to you and you don’t pay for it, we simply do it because we want to and because we think it benefits society (and us, since our favorite software applications thus keep improving). It’s part of our DNA, and we’re just mentioning this here in case you’re a FLOSS enthusiast as well.
The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. We keep planting them.
For every new client, we are guerrilla-planting 10 trees in the city. Not because we want to offset the amount of post-its we use (we rarely use any), but because we’re looking for excuses to go outdoors and make the cement jungle less of a dystopian industrial wasteland. The trees are meant to symbolize the life and growth of your brand and its offerings. Also, we read r/collapse/ too much.
Are we made for each other?
We work across most industries (with a few exceptions), including emergent technology companies, startups, non-profits, transportation, SaaS and cloud infrastructures, gaming, construction, education, healthcare, food & agriculture, government, hospitality, industrial manufacturing, retail, etc.
What is our best type of client? They are those who love what they do and trust us to support their business. Those clients find the most value in hiring us, and they trust us to be there for them when needed. Our best work comes from collaborating with those who are passionate about their customer experience, and who get as excited as we do about the result of our work. If this fits your description, we want to give you, your staff, and your customers, the best that you deserve.