Pinnacle Performance

The Problem

The same client I built the Maryland Skipjacks for came back for a second brand, and that is the part I am proudest of. This one needed a different feeling. Pinnacle Performance was an elite summer training program in the mid-Atlantic, and it had to read less like a club and more like a proving ground, the place a serious player goes to get better. Winning the repeat business meant I had gotten the first brand right. Keeping it meant making the second one its own thing, not a recolor of the Skipjacks.

The Work

I gave Pinnacle a rugged mountain-peak identity: a snow-capped summit with the "Pinnacle Performance" wordmark locked in beneath it, drawn to hold up on a black training tee, a rink banner, and a phone screen alike. Pinnacle as a literal peak, so the brand says "reach the top" without spelling it out.

Then I ran the campaigns, year after year:

• "Rushmore" alumni key art, my favorite piece of the whole engagement. It puts the program's real college and pro alumni up like faces carved on a monument, which lets a training camp prove its results with names instead of adjectives: Nick Sorkin (AHL), Sam Anas (Quinnipiac), Joe Snively (Yale).
• Player accomplishment posters for alumni like Sam Anas, a national rookie-of-the-year candidate. That kind of proof sells a development program better than any line I could write for it.
• Four straight years of exposure-camp campaigns, the "Achieve Excellence" and "Join the Family" pushes, in print, email, and motion, that filled the summer program season after season.

Impact

Two brands, one client, four years of campaigns. Pinnacle is the work I point to when I talk about earning trust: you do the first job well enough that the client stops second-guessing the creative and hands you the next one. The mountain identity held across every campaign, and the alumni key art gave the program a way to recruit on evidence. This was independent work under Maxim Digital, the studio, and the whole relationship started two years earlier with a ship's wheel (see Maryland Skipjacks).