ABOUT

KATE DEMBOWSKI

Finally Using Life’s Lemons (FULL)

Overview:

Finally Using Life’s Lemons (FULL) is an uplifting branding identity design that redefines the traditional perception of a midlife crisis by transforming it into a “midlife opportunity.” I had the pleasure of collaborating with Chelsea Rogers to create this zesty and optimistic brand identity.

Audience:

Many middle-aged adults (ages 40 – 60) experience transitional life phases that leave them feeling hopeless, depressed, and unmotivated. These experiences can include divorce, a career change, and kids permanently leaving the house. FULL aims to uplift these people and allow them to embrace the possibilities that come with maturity and experience.

Our eye-catching visual choices help further the essence of our brand. Using bright colors, a friendly typeface, and a series of abstracted lemon icons, FULL is light-hearted, optimistic, and embracing of life’s unpredictable changes.

We created a series of products and brand applications to further apply FULL’s principles. These include a FULL website, social media, signage, clothing, and even a lemonade pitcher set. Our cohesive set of assets captures the fullness of life while allowing those in a midlife crisis to embrace the change with open arms.

Process + Outcomes:

We began our process by conducting in-depth research about the midlife crisis and our target audience. Our findings showed the importance of empowerment, growth, opportunity, and transformation.

Next, we created a visual moodboard that would help display our ideas graphically through our brand’s voice. This included sources of inspiration for graphic imagery, type, grids, colors, and language.

From our moodboard, we developed brand concepts and language that felt youthful, exciting, and lemon-adjacent, using phrases like, “Remember to be zestful,” and “Embrace the curves of life.”

We decided to incorporate several unique elements that were abstracted from a lemon’s curves after remembering the phrase, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” This felt very fitting since our brand concepts and essence were about seizing life’s opportunities.

After deciding on the name, “Finally Using Life’s Lemons”, we began the iteration process by creating a wide variety of wordmarks. Our designs played with
scalability, typefaces, spacing, and composition of our acronym. We then implemented our favorite wordmarks into a series of fun and playful brand applications.

Each application incorporated several elements that spoke to our brand essence and visual direction, with one of the most prominent being the use of abstracted lemon slices. We thoroughly explored how much a lemon slice could be simplified and used to create cohesive shapes, icons, and patterns.