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It was David versus Goliath, with Attila the Hun thrown in to make it interesting. Microsoft had invited three brand designers to Redmond, Washington, in 2004 to present a new identity for the upcoming Xbox 360. Landor, the incumbent, was an obvious choice as it had created the packaging for Windows and attained legendary marketing status for transforming Federal Express into FedEx, including the slogan "The world on time" and the masterpiece logo. Turner Duckworth, out of London and San Francisco, authors of the Amazon.com identity (with its "logo that smiles from A to Z") was also a contender. And then there was David: JDK Design. From … Vermont.

Led by Xbox's global brand director at the time, Don Hall, some 20 members of the gaming division gathered to hear the back-to-back-to-back presentations. First up was Michael Jager, JDK's creative director. Standing before the tribunal, Jager (pronounced like the Rolling Stone) illustrated his vision through a combination of street theater, design psychology, and cultural fluency. Comparing the original Xbox with the Incredible Hulk, Jager used a razor to slash an X in a sheet of paper and then thrust his head through the hole. "X today is all AARGGHHH!" he bellowed. Pure aggressive power. He then withdrew his head, flipped the paper, and revealed how that X could become a doorway, "an invitation to an experience." Jager acknowledged power as a critical component separating Xbox from its competitors but urged the company to see it--and express it-- differently. "Our approach was to transition Xbox from this hulk of escaping power into this quiet power that is lurking, something still incredibly dangerous but with more of an elegance and grace," he recalls. "The analogy we used was Bruce Lee." And thus were two firms felled by a single stone.

"We were all just blown away by JDK," Hall remembers. "As soon as Michael and his team walked out, I looked around the room and knew it was just a formality to sit through the other presentations." Indeed, Jager's illustrative shorthand became a mantra for the 360 team as it created the look and feel of the new system. "Whenever we evaluated our work in terms of guiding our decisions for Xbox 360," Hall says, "it was like, 'This is too Hulk' or 'We need more Bruce Lee.'"

Getting Away With It

JDK was no doubt the dark horse for the Xbox account, but the Burlington-based company is no overnight sensation. Over the past 18 years, its client list has included MTV, Nike, Levi's, Patagonia, and Timex. But the rock in JDK's sling on that day in Redmond dates back to its relationship with another Vermont shop. "In the beginning, we were three people in the basement of my house doing design, and Jake had come up the same way--five people in a barn pressing his own boards," says Jager at JDK's SoHo studio in New York (it has a third satellite in Portland, Oregon, and 105 employees). Jager's fellow basement dwellers complete the firm's name: "D" is Jager's wife, Giovanna Di Paola, the associate creative director, and "K" is David Kemp, the marketing director and CFO. "Jake," of course, is Jake Burton Carpenter, the founder of Burton Snowboards.