Next Chapter is a spec project for a fictional executive career coach, Tom Richards. I wanted to explore how a brand could speak to someone considering a career change after twenty years of work.
I built the project around Sarah, a fictional prospective client. She has a good title, a comfortable salary, and experience she does not want to lose. But she is ready for a change and cannot see what the next move should be.
That became the starting point for the strategy, messaging, and visual identity.
01 · STRATEGY
Where did the idea come from?
I started with research. I used Gemini Deep Research to get familiar with the executive-coaching market, pull together sources, and see how people talked about changing careers later in life.
Then I went through it looking for one problem strong enough to build a brand around.
For this project, I focused on someone who wanted to change careers without treating the last twenty years as wasted time. That was the problem I chose to build the brand around.
That gave me Tom Richards, a fictional coach who had made that kind of move himself. His job was to help Sarah see her experience clearly, turn it into a plan, and choose what came next.
I used Donald Miller’s StoryBrand approach to organize the message. Sarah is the main character, and Tom is the guide who helps her understand her options and make a plan.
02 · MESSAGE ARCHITECTURE
What did the brand need to say?
With Sarah clear, I moved into the messaging. The job was to make her feel understood before Tom ever talked about a program.
The primary promise became:
Turn decades of experience into a clear career direction, without starting over.
And the thought underneath it was even simpler:
You already have what you need for what’s next.
I worked through Sarah’s problem, Tom’s role, and the change she wanted to make. The messaging board helped me check whether those pieces made sense together.
The second half gave her a way forward. It added a three-step plan, the belief the brand stands for, the idea it pushes against, the stakes, and a clear next step.
Map your experience. Choose your direction. Make your move.
The line that held that half together was:
You’re not starting over. You’re starting from experience.
Now the message had a flow. Sarah could see herself in the problem, understand Tom’s role, and picture a next move that did not erase what she had already built.
The Key Idea
The messaging was clear, but I still needed one idea big enough to hold the words and the visual identity together.
I gave myself three directions so the first idea did not have to win. The one I kept was:
Help executives use decades of experience as fuel for a mountain of their own, and write the next chapter on purpose.
That gave me three useful words.
Fuel came from the promise that Sarah’s experience was still valuable. Mountain came from choosing her own direction. Chapter made it clear that the story was continuing.
Those words also led me back to the single-minded proposition, which is the one sentence every message and design choice had to support:
Your experience is the fuel, not the problem.
If an idea made Sarah feel as if she had to erase the past, it did not belong. That was the filter.
03 · VISUAL WORLD
How did the message become a visual world?
The three words gave me a much clearer design brief. The identity needed to show movement without making Sarah look as if she were starting from zero.
The first visual direction wasn’t working, so I kept the strategy and messaging and started the identity again.
I used Gemini for research, Codex to work through the strategy, and Image Remix to create photographs for the fictional brand. The example below shows how I adapted a speaking image to test the message in context.
I kept the type bold and direct, with electric blue as the main color and lime as an accent. Topographic lines and an arrow connected the identity to the idea of choosing a route.
The photography stayed editorial and quiet. I wanted the images to feel grounded in a serious decision, so I stayed away from stock handshakes and big breakthrough moments.
What did the project become?
Once the identity was working, I pushed the same ideas into a homepage direction, program cards, social graphics, campaign art, and a speaking image.
These are proposed applications for the spec project, rather than materials from a client launch.
The message says Sarah’s experience still has value. The mountain gives that experience somewhere to go. And everything on the board comes back to the same line: Your experience is the fuel, not the problem.
While it was great working on this and sharing this, I really feel that this was a brand that I could have used at one point in my career. It’s just always great to bring ideas like this to life because I can imagine that there are a lot of Sarahs out there. If you are a coach reading this, I hope that you feel inspired to keep moving forward in what you’re doing.
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