Tony Finau is one of the best golfers in the world today. His charitable foundation, The Tony Finau Foundation, is committed to strengthening underserved communities by equipping them with educational, recreational and healthcare resources. I have worked directly with TFF over the last 3 years to design a new website, brand materials, and unique identities for their annual charitable events.

The Problem
In many ways, Tony is an untraditional golfer. He is fun-loving and more family oriented than most professional golfers at his level. He is an incredibly humble person, and frankly hates asking people to donate to his foundation. The challenge we were faced with was creating a site and supporting brand that represented Tony’s fun personality, but also resonated with high net worth professionals to convert them from fans to donors. As the lead designer, I worked directly with Tony and his team to accomplish these goals.

The Solution
Using unique and interesting colors paired with bold typography, the brand came to life. We paired elements of spontaneity with elements that were more controlled to speak to his dual audience. Tony hosts large charitable events each year: Tony at Topgolf, the TFF Gala, and the Golf Classic. Each year I have given these events a unique identity that falls within the same system as the overall brand. Tony enjoys seeing experimentation in these identities, so I pushed the boundaries where appropriate, but also stuck to the establishing brand principles to not alienate those who were prospective donors.

Challenges
We often had tight turnarounds with these projects due to Tony’s busy schedule. This helped me become extremely efficient in my design process, and timely in my decision making. Through these experiences, I have learned how to work quickly, while maintaining high quality work.

I have done many things for TFF that have been professionally printed. This has helped me become familiar with the printing process. Designing with printing in mind forced me to focus on the set up details before jumping into the high fidelity designs. I needed to make sure the files were set up correctly and the systems were in place so it would be a high quality output. In many ways, working with printers has actually helped me become a better product designer.