COMPANY IDENTITY AND STYLE BOOK
Dear colleagues, The following brand book was created to help bring consistency to the way we all communicate about Zenph. We each share a responsibility to present the Zenph brand correctly in any form of communication, whether in print, online, on air, or even in conversation. This brand book provides you the necessary tools to represent Zenph as a unified, instantly recognizable entity that speaks with one voice. No matter what position you hold, you have the power to protect and extend the Zenph brand. Following these guidelines is more than a responsibility, it’s an opportunity to share the exciting Zenph story. Happy branding, Adriana DiFranco Director of Brand + Community Zenph Sound Innovations
OUR STORY
VOICE
FAQs milestones brand values brand surrogates brand positioning
tone key messages boiler plate media relations
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IDENTITY
PHOTOGRAPHY
zenph logo logo standards formats usage examples
stock imagery guidelines
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EDITORIAL GUIDELINES
TOOLBOX
usage trademarks
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color palette formatting text powerpoint template intro & outro for video
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OUR STORY FAQs AND THE ELEVATOR PITCH What do you do? We make musical experience richer. How do you what you do? We create data that no one else can, which enables revolutionary new products, applications and experiences. Who are you? We are a technology company that makes music more immersive and interactive. We create content, live experiences and software that make music more powerful, immediate and accessible. Our team is comprised of musicians, researchers, technologists and product specialists who seek to understand exactly how humans perform music. We transform musical performance into data and then render it into sound, which can be used in completely new ways. What is your vision? Our proprietary platform expresses musical performance as malleable data. Rendered from this data, audio content is liberated from “frozen” recordings—creating immersive and interactive capabilities comparable to those of high-resolution computer graphics. This revolutionary new advance will enable a universe of new artistic, educational and consumer experiences.
We produce data that faithfully represents the nuance of a musician’s performance.
...which allow richer, more immersive music experiences, and inform and improve our data.
This data enables revolutionary new applications and products...
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How long have you been around? We were founded in 2002. We had 5 employees for a long time, 7 years or so, and now we have 30 employees spread across 5 states. How many recordings have you made? We’ve released three recordings through Sony Masterworks so far. Recent Sony recordings include Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff, and Art Tatum, Piano Starts Here: Live At The Shrine. Our music has been used in a few collaborations to date, Rachmaninoff was used in Joshua Bell At Home with Friends. An Art Tatum re-performance was used in an original Gordon Goodwin composition called Yesterdays. Are you a record label? Yes, but creating and distributing music is only a smart part of what we do. Our content releases help to create awareness and understanding about other aspects of our company. Like other record labels, we produce, manufacture and distribute recordings in the traditional sense. We also collaborate with other record labels to distribute our music. We’ve created such relationships with partners like Sony Masterworks and Concord Music Group. Why did you start in the jazz and classical music genres? Will you ever move into other genres? We began by working with technology that already existed: the performance capabilities of the Yamaha Disklavier Pro Piano. That meant beginning with work on solo piano works, the majority of which are in the jazz and classical genres. As we develop the ability to produce data for more and more instruments, we will move into other genres. What’s next? We’re moving from solo piano to the upright bass, saxophone and percussion. Then we’ll proceed through all the instruments separately and in ensemble.
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NAVIGATING CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS While most people who know Zenph are big fans, there are some who have a visible knee-jerk reaction to our work. It’s best to confront these critics amiably with accurate information. Are you trying to replace musicians? No. Computers will never replace the artistry of human performers. That’s not the focus of our work. We empower musicians, composers and music educators with tools they can use to teach and participate more fully in the music experience. Our technology validates that what human beings bring to the table is creativity. We’re augmenting and assisting that creativity, not replacing it. When Pixar came on the scene, many animators worried that the company would make them obsolete. The opposite has happened. Is your data for sale? Yes, you can buy it in the form of our recordings or LX files. Are you exploiting dead artists? No. These re-performances are actually new sources of revenue for the artists’ estates, and we work with estates to get their full participation and cooperation. Ultimately, we want to preserve and promote music that might otherwise be lost. We are archiving the most accurate representation of influential artists and composers and keeping their legacy alive so that we may learn from and build on their musical contributions. Why tinker with the unknown mysteries of artistry? Finding the “digital DNA” of an artist doesn’t diminish their genius, it enhances it. It also allows us to better analyze and learn from their work. For instance, our re-performance work with jazz artist Art Tatum has allowed the first accurate scores of his work to be transcribed, effectively advancing jazz studies forever.
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Isn’t what you do just enhanced digital re-mastering? Remastering cleans up old recordings. We create entirely new performances. Remastering is a process of taking older recordings (often on older media such as reel-to-reel tapes), cleaning them up to the expectations of modern listeners, and preparing them for delivery on new media (such as CD or digital mp3) or sound reproduction (such as stereo or surround) formats. Remastering often involves operations such as noise reduction (removing artifacts captured in the original medium), dynamics processing (to make a recording sound as loud as possible without excessive distortion), and spatialization (to take advantage of the immersion potential of many loudspeakers, for instance in a home theater setting). The key problem with remastering is that it is limited to these types of modifications. At every stage of the remastering process one is still dealing with the raw original audio waveforms. There exists no data regarding musical events or performance gestures to accompany these waveforms. As a result, one cannot change the style of the performance, the notes, the instruments, the venue, the soundstage, or any of the other aspects that become instantly malleable with Zenph’s core technology. Similarly, remastering does not allow one to rerecord or re-mix the entire performance, as is often necessary in cases where masters are lost, and all that exists are scratchy, hundred-year-old wax cylinder recordings or distorted and damaged recordings from video.
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MILESTONES OF IMPORTANT MOMENTS 1969: A 16-year-old John Walker starts taking piano lessons from Ruth Slenczynska, one of only two students taught by Sergei Rachmaninoff. He practices and practices, but ultimately decides he wants to hear Mr. Rachmaninoff play live without having to go through all the work of trying to sound like him. A life-long passion project is born. Summer 1994: John and his friend Steve Joyce sit in John’s living room in Chapel Hill coming up with a list of 400 names for their new software company. They are both eating hamburgers. They both speak German. Steve wipes some mustard off his mouth and John points to it and says, “Senf!” the German word for mustard. An intentional misspelling of the word, Zenph, makes it onto the list of names. They eventually pick the name Ganymede Software for their new company. John holds onto that list of 400 names. 1994-2000: Ganymede Software goes on to become an enormous success. John and his partners grew the company and eventually sold it in what was at the time the largest acquisition of a software company in North Carolina history. March 2000: On the highest day of the Nasdaq, John and his co-founders sell Ganymede Software. Now John has a nest-egg to bankroll his Rachmaninoff dream. January 11, 2002: John and his friend and former Ganymede partner Peter Schwaller incorporate their new company called Zenph. They both remembered the name and liked the 5 letter thing, since it seemed memorable, unique and reminded them of successful names like Xerox and Kodak. Summer 2002: Zenph purchases its first Disklavier Pro. It is shipped to John’s 2000 square-foot house in Cary so that John must live with two 9-foot concert grand pianos in his living room. Fall 2002: John purchases a home in North Raleigh in a neighborhood called Greywalls. The house has no living room. He hires contractors to break ground for a recital hall. September 21, 2003: First performance at John’s Greywalls recital hall, a song recital arranged by Jeff Aldridge. We capture the data to start to learn about parameters for piano performance.
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January 2004: After months and months of work, we get the Disklavier Pro to play Mary Had A Little Lamb using a data file written from scratch by our parsing and editing software courtesy of Peter Schwaller and Drew Gross. November 2004: Our assignment to reverse engineer the Disklavier Pro is completed! Champagne is popped. January 1, 2005: While looking online for a researcher to advance Zenph’s technology, John discovers a set of piano-transcription-related publications written by Randal Leistikow, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. Intrigued by his work, John contacts him by phone and offers him a job. Two days later, Randal is scheduled to fly to a final interview for a professor position at a prestigious university. Instead, on gut instinct, he cancels the trip and takes the position at Zenph, becoming its fifth employee. February 2005: Eureka! We record our first re-performance track! Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg aria (1955 recording). It sounds completely awful, but our enthusiasm is undeterred. 2005: We host a recital series and capture more performance data. April 2005: Our third re-performance of a real track, played by Cortot. June 2006: We sign our first agreement with Sony. August 2006: We go to Toronto to record our first recording of Gould re-performances. Many new friends and Zenph family members are made. September 26, 2006: We play Art Tatum for Oscar Peterson. He weeps when he hears his old friend again. It is Oscar’s 74th birthday and we celebrate with he and his family and enjoy lemon sesame birthday cake. September 23, 2007: We record a re-performance of Art Tatum live at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. His widow Geraldine is in attendance.
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June 2008: Our live theatrical show Art Tatum: Piano Starts Here premieres to enthusiastic audiences at the historic Apollo Theatre in Harlem. December 2008: Our Art Tatum re-performance of the song Yesterdays is used by Hollywood composer Gordon Goodwin in a new big band arrangement. The song garners the first Grammy nomination involving Zenph technology. We lose to Peter Gabriel and Wall-E. November 6, 2009: Zenph plays Rachmaninoff at Carnegie Hall. John’s former teach Ruth Slenczynska is in attendance to see the realization of his dream. November 13, 2009: Kip Frey joins as Chief Executive Officer. Zenph secures $10.7 million in new venture capital financing. The company formally changes its name from Zenph Studios to Zenph Sound Innovations, Inc. August 2009: Enabled by our technology, Art Tatum plays live with the 18-piece Gordon Goodwin Big Phat Band on stage at The Hollywood Bowl. January 2010: Randal reconnects with Harvey Thornburg, his former colleague from Stanford with whom he’d written many papers. They discuss how Zenph might expand its R&D to realize the dream of being fully-funded. That discussion results in a legendary flowchart and Harvey later joins Zenph full-time to help realize the deepest musical/technical/aural aspects of the Zenph vision. April 2010: Zenph moves into a temporary space at American Tobacco Campus. A hiring spree begins. December 2010: We mount another live production of Art Tatum: Piano Starts Here at the Kennedy Theater in Raleigh. Critics love us, audiences grow slowly until we are sold out at the end of the run. February 2011: We advance our technology to be able to re-perform the upright bass. The sweet sounds of Ray Brown and Oscar Peterson jamming together fill the Zenph recital hall. February 2011: Zenph acquires TimeWarp Technologies, a small but well-respected producer of intelligent, interactive music software. TimeWarp president George Litterst joins the team. March 2011: Zenph breaks ground for its new world headquarters on the American Tobacco Campus.
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BRAND VALUES Brand Attributes: Passionate, sophisticated, world-class, visionary, confident, trailblazer, revolutionary, reliable, enthusiastic, craftsmanship, impeccable quality
BRAND SURROGATES Companies who we can look to emulate. Apple: visionary, in everything they touch they improve the experience. TIVO: radically improved the TV watching experience. Invented their own category. Gave people an experience and power no one had had before. Virgin: they rearrange people’s expectations of how good an experience can be, whether it’s air travel, mobile phone use, wines or music. Pixar: they are researchers and inventors who achieved a new level of quality, realism, and possibility in in their category. They had to create the science and technology they needed to make their vision a reailty. They make the tools they use to create their art. Bloomberg: they create data and sell it to others who in turn create their own products. Human Genome Sciences: they use data in unprecedented ways to discover, develop, manufacture and market innovative drugs.
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BRAND POSITIONING Current brand positioning: Our current brand position has been dictated primarily by our products. We are a brand known to niche audiences. We are somewhat well known to audiophiles and in specialized academic circles. In these realms, we are highly respected and admired. In the broader consumer market we have little recognition and awareness, at this time. Currently we’re a company known for reissues of classical and jazz music for audiophiles. But classical and jazz are not something to emphasize long term – it’s too narrow. The audiophile movement that is being waged against laptop speakers and MP3’s, this is not our battle to wage. We will never reach a mass market if we do that. Future brand positioning: The musical equivalent of Pixar, or a trusted standard like Dolby or THX. Zenph becomes synonymous with a small piece of proprietary code that everyone will want for their recordings, software, video games that automatically makes “Music More Immersive.” Our current brand feel is: A Tesla car with with a Sonic Frontiers car stereo, incredible engineering and attention to detail, very exclusive and only available and distinguishable to a small sliver of the population. We want to move toward: Segway: high standards and excellence in delivering a completely new experience, but more available to a mainstream population.
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VOICE SPEAKING IN ONE VOICE When everyone comes together and speaks as one, we’re able to communicate our message with more impact. Not only does the message break through the clutter, others begin to listen more thoughtfully to what’s being said.
TONE The Zenph tone is one of quiet confidence. There’s a sense of assuredness, elegance and sophistication in our messaging. We’re fueled by our collective talent, pride, love of music and search for excellence. We’re confident but we do not speak in hyperbole. We are world-class experts, yet we’re approachable. That feeling of approachability should come through in our words—both spoken and written. Sentences should have no wasted words or flowery language. When technical language or sophisticated concepts are necessary, they are explained clearly and directly.
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KEY MESSAGES We think so highly of our customers that we’re not willing to shortchange them on musical experience. Zenph enables a better listening experience, a better learning experience, a better professional environment for music. Our tools and products are: interactive, immersive, realistic, powerful, and work exceptionally well. Our tools have to be so good so that the musical experience you create with them will be immersive, realistic, and powerful. We give people access to music that would otherwise be impossible to hear. We liberate music from its medium. We seek to understand how human beings perform. We quantify what they do when they perform. We‘re working to create powerful music tools for professional producers, musicians, music educators and music listeners. Culture is becoming more participatory, yet music is still being experienced passively. Modern consumers demand a more participatory music experience: we’re giving it to them.
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BOILER PLATE When you need an all-purpose description of our company to give to the world, use this. About Zenph Sound Innovations, Inc. Zenph Sound Innovations® is a music technology company based in Durham, North Carolina. The Zenph team, comprised of musicians, technologists and product specialists devotes itself to understanding precisely how musicians play. That understanding, combined with groundbreaking technology, produces incredibly rich, highly detailed data that is transformed into dazzling new recordings, products and live re-performances®.
The company’s work was named one of the Best Ideas of the Year by The New York Times Magazine and has received multiple GRAMMY® nominations. The astonishing fidelity and nuance of sound heard in the Zenph re-performance process has earned the company accolades from music lovers and critics the world over, including astonishing, back-to-back, perfect-10 reviews from The Absolute Sound and a Record To Die For distinction from Stereophile. Recent Zenph recordings with Sony Masterworks include Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff, Art Tatum, Piano Starts Here: Live At The Shrine, and Joshua Bell At Home with Friends. The company also develops cutting-edge piano teaching software and tools. Future Zenph projects include performance editing software, educational products and printed scores.
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MEDIA RELATIONS Any media inquiries should be directed to Adriana DiFranco. Never speak to the media without support. Once you are cleared to speak to the media, there are definitely some characterizations and topics to steer clear of. There have been stories written about Zenph where our aim was horribly misunderstood or twisted, so be sure to disabuse journalists of the following notions: We don’t resurrect dead artists. Never use the term resurrect. We aren’t an artifical intelligence company. The point of our work is not to replace musicians.
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IDENTITY ZENPH LOGO Making our mark. Our logo is the face and signature of our brand. It connects the brand through all forms of communication. The more consistent a logo looks and is used—the more likely it will be remembered and make an impact. Visit the shared Z: drive under the Marketing folder to download the approved versions of the logo.
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SPEC I A L 1. The icon features a radial gradient and slight bevel. FEATURES 2. The logotype is 65% black with a drop shadow.
COLORS
PANTONE
CMYK
RGB
Black 65%
0, 0, 0, 65
120, 120, 120
Pantone 3005
100, 34, 0, 2
0, 129, 198
LOGO STANDARDS Background+Placement: The Zenph logo should have an equally spaced 1/8" margin on all sides and appear only on solid white or solid black. Size Restrictions: Small sizes that dilute the glint on the Zenph icon should be avoided. As a general rule, do not use smaller than 1.5" by 0.5". Don’ts: Don’t use the separator when using only the icon. Don’t change colors or place the logo on a background other than solid white or solid black. Don’t stretch, skew, or add additional effects to the logo. Don’t rearrange the elements of the logo in any way.
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LOGO FORMATS
Corporate足 Version: Used for all Zenph communications and stationery.
Icon Version (dimensional or flat): Used in situations where space restricts the use of the entire logo.
Business Division Versions: Used in communications pertaining to a particular business unit.
Flat Versions: Used when a dimensional version with the drop shadow is impractical. Monagrammed on a hat, for example.
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CORRECT EXAMPLES 0.5" 1.5"
INCORRECT EXAMPLES
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PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHIC STYLE The images we use in Zenph marketing materials should reflect our values. They should be clear, professional, and sophisticated. It is preferable to use our own in-house images over stock photos.
STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY Make sure the images you use have the right clearances for the medium and are the correct size and resolution for the job.
GUIDELINES When working with a photographer or videographer, always confirm that Zenph has the appropriate usage rights. Only a complete buy-out with the appropriate model release forms will allow usage throughout all media and for an unlimited time period. Always obtain correct permissions for usage and model release forms before publishing. Please Note: Store any photography digitally on CD in high resolution. Never take low resolution images from web sites. Never publish photography without confirming the conditions in writing under which they were sold or commissioned.
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EDITORIAL GUIDELINES These editorial guidelines are designed to foster consistency of style and usage in our communications. This content is not exhaustive, but it does attempt to answer many commonly asked questions directly related to us. It’s important that these guidelines are followed to ensure our information is presented correctly. We use Yamaha® Disklavier Pro pianos. Note that critical “k” in the center of “Disklavier”. If you can picture a kangaroo on a Disklavier, you will always remember the correct way to spell the word. While Yamaha spells PRO in all caps, Zenph uses mixed case to spell Pro. A regular Disklavier piano (without the word Pro next to it) is a very different instrument. It can only handle low-resolution files, while the Disklavier Pro works with high-resolution files. Do not refer to a product as being “Yamaha compatible,” or “Yamaha-Authorized,” except with prior written permission from Yamaha. Trademarks are adjectives, and must only be used as such, e.g., a Yamaha brand piano. Yamaha marks should never be used as nouns or verbs, nor should marks be pluralized or used in the possessive form. Example:
Correct: YAMAHA® pianos come in a variety of styles.
Incorrect: Disklaviers® come in a variety of styles.
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TRADEMARKS We currently own the following trademarks. These words should be given a circle R or Trademark on first mention and can be written without the marks on subsequent mentions.
Re-performance® Zenph® Classroom Maestro™ Home Concert Xtreme™ Internet MIDI™ RePerform™
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TOOLBOX COLOR PALETTE
PANTONE 3005 RGB: 0,129,198 CMYK: 100,34,0,2
PANTONE 1255 RGB: 79,99,174 CMYK: 79,66,0,0
PANTONE 5483 RGB: 56,147,155 CMYK: 62,0,21,31
PANTONE 2726 RGB: 79,99,174 CMYK: 79,66,0,0
BLACK 65% RGB: 120,120,120 CMYK: 0,0,0,65
PANTONE 511 RGB: 98,27,75 CMYK: 60,100,45,30
Please use these sophisticated, muted colors when you create any new marketing materials. RGB values are given for computer screen output, while CYMK values should be used for materials to be printed.
FORMATTING TEXT Outlook e-mail signatures use the following fonts: Name, title, & company name in Century Gothic, 12pt., black (RGB: 0,0,0) Address, phone, email in Calibri, 11pt., gray (RGB: 95,95,95)
Word documents and office communication should be formatted the following way: Please note: It is not neccessary to type capital letters when using small caps. Please avoid capitialization when typing titles and headers using the small caps formatting style.
titles & headers in calibri, small caps, 22pt., expanded by 2.2pt., zenph blue Body text in Calibri, Regular, 11pt., Black
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POWERPOINT TEMPLATE You will find the PowerPoint template on the Z:drive under the Marketing Folder. ■ Always start your PowerPoint presentation from the Zenph theme/template. This can be found at the top of the page under “Themes.” ■ For each slide that you create, you can select a slide layout that best fits with the data you are trying to present. You can find each slide type under “layout” on the first tab. ■ Please always use the Zenph Title Slide as your first slide when creating a new presentation. ■ Please always use the Zenph closing slide as your last slide for each presentation. ■ You may have to adjust the picture size or graph size to make it fit on each individual slide. You can do this by moving the corners of the image in and out accordingly. ■ If your image/graph will not fit on the slide with the footer, you may select a Zenph slide that does not have the footer to accommodate your image.
VIDEO INTRO & OUTRO We have created signature Zenph introductory frames and exit frames to mark all video segments that we own. It can be found on the Graphics Workstation computer.
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The little brand that could. When you look at giant powerhouse brands like Pixar, Apple or Google, it’s hard to imagine that they were ever anything else.
But even those companies began somewhere.
You are at the exciting birthplace of a brand. It’s challenging and tumultuous some days, exhilarating others. But we have the people and path in place to do EXTRAORDINARY things together.
Hold your head up high, you’re a part of Zenph. And we’re about to set the music world on its ear.
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