Margot Chase Documentary Review

I learned a lot from the documentary about Margot Chase, other than the fact that she is a badass.

Margot Chase and her Chief Strategist, Chris Lowery caught my attention when they mentioned their philosophy to let the client have ownership of design. 

The Chase Design Group created Chinese Laundry's visual collateral including logos, graphics and packaging. The graphics in Chinese Laundries' branding design featured flowers, a hummingbird, a women's face and feet that were layered together to create a feminine floral mood. To allow Chinese Laundry to own these elements and use them for later projects, the designers separated each element and gave them the images on a disk. Chinese Laundry could then use the images in the future and achieve the unified floral and feminine mood across multiple projects. This allowed Chinese Laundry to "learn how to fish" instead of only "fishing for a day".

For the designers working on the Chinese Laundry project, "Stephanie" is the imagined persona that represents the demographic that the designers wish to appeal to. Stephanie is a semi-laid back and pampered young woman whom enjoys spending free time cruising around the mall. She is well informed about fashion brands and chooses to remain refined and reasonable. Stephanie exists to remind the designers that they are designing for someone real and should not make stylistic choices that are right for them, but what is right for Stephanie.