Terry Slaughter defies categories. Writer, designer, painter, retired branding-firm executive—none of those quite captures what he does. When Slaughter takes on a client, he wants to touch every aspect of the business, not just its image but its reason for being. The result isn’t branding in any conventional sense. It’s making businesses worth caring about.
His work with Livano reflects this philosophy—helping to elevate the resident experience to create not only a sense of home but community, belonging, and beauty.
Over his career, Slaughter has earned the trust of prestigious clients, won many awards, and mentored young creatives, often taking risks and following his instincts even when it meant challenging convention. From his garden studio in Birmingham, Ala., Slaughter discusses his career, his philosophy, and taking the road less traveled.
In 2021, LIV Development invited Terry Slaughter to reimagine its corporate identity and create a unifying brand for its growing portfolio of apartment communities. Design, connection, and care have always been at the core of LIV’s development philosophy, and Slaughter translated those values into a cohesive visual language. The Livano brand was curated to feel both elevated and deeply human.
From the distinctive Livano name and logo to the thoughtful details that shape each community experience, Slaughter’s fingerprints are on many of the unique elements that contribute to the Livano lifestyle — including the very magazine you hold in your hands.
Did you always want to be a designer?
I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My whole life I was always creating things. My parents were very encouraging, but no one said to me, ‘You know, you really ought to be a designer.’ I didn’t know what a designer was; I never thought that was a career.
My mother was active in working with the poor and (nourishing) their faith, and so I was really involved with that, too. She thought I would go into ministry. My dad was in the FBI but had retired from it by the time I went to college and was practicing law. So I thought I would be a lawyer, go home to Dothan, Ala., and practice with my dad. Then just when I was about to graduate and apply to law school, my best friend said, ‘What are you doing? You don’t need to be a lawyer. You need to be a designer.’ I finally connected all the dots, and I stayed in school for another 18 months taking purely design courses.
Is it true you started your own firm when you were just 23?
There was a little ad agency in Dothan, and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll hire you.’ That was right out of college, and a little more than three months into it, I said, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life, but I want to control my own destiny.’ I wanted to do a whole bunch of other thing. So I just started a firm. I had no vision other than wanting to be the best designer I could possibly be.
How would you describe your work at the time?
I was always interested in so many disciplines. As a boy I loved studying architecture, and I loved gardens, all these different things. So even early in my career, without really realizing it, I was becoming multi-disciplined. I designed a little logo for this little bank, and they said, ‘Well, Terry, can you do the sign too?’ The sign was in a ratty looking space, so I said, ‘We really need to landscape this.’ If I was going to design, I was going to do it holistically. I wanted to touch every single tentacle that came from the brand.
How did you decide to move the firm to Birmingham?
We were growing out of Dothan. We were picking up accounts in Birmingham, and I’d come up and service the accounts; eventually I opened an office here and I would commute. Dothan was my home, and I loved my home. But then AmSouth Bank—which was the biggest account in the state—had seen the work and asked, ‘Can you handle this account?’ And we got it. We kept growing. Eventually we had 100 people.
Did you enjoy heading a firm that size?
I was still very much interested in creating a DNA for the client to make them better. So I got heavily involved in how their cultures worked and how every aspect worked—the sign, the interiors, and what the fragrances were…sometimes the clients’ eyes would roll, or they’d get excited but say, ‘I’m not sure we can do all this.’ And while I don’t regret it, I realized I had not been successful in backing away from the work myself. I had all these accounts and all these people, but I was still immersed in every detail. I was on the verge of imploding. Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually I was unraveling. We were still winning national awards for creative, and we were doing great work, but I wanted the process to be more contemplative. I wanted it to be more spiritual. I wanted to use design in a way that was going to truly make an impact on the human condition.
Finally, one day, very impulsively, I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ I started resigning accounts over the period of a month. It was very foolish—not the idea of doing it, but I could have had a better plan.
That’s kind of shocking. What was the plan?
If I had to drive it down to one point, I would say I wanted to use my talents I felt like God had given to me, and I wanted to use design to enliven people’s spirits and to change the way they thought about things and felt about things.
Then one day I was having dinner with someone, and she asked, ‘What are you doing now? I heard you went haywire.’ I told her what I wanted to do. She said, ‘You need to talk to my son. He’s going to be founding this new town down on 30A near Rosemary Beach.’
So he called me and said he’d like to talk to me about it. I pontificated about all these things, and told him, ‘If you make this community amazing, if you put your attention towards all the things that will impact the human condition, you won’t have to run an ad at all.’ But he still thought he needed an ad agency, and I said, ‘I’m not your man.’ About three months later he called and said, ‘I’ve talked to ad agencies, and I need what you can do.’ We started a friendship, and it was a blessing from God for both of us. He wanted me to help lay the groundwork for what this community, which became Alys Beach, was going to look like. It became an experience where they let me do everything with the idea of, let’s see how great we can be and not even worry about ‘branding’ yet.
It launched a new side of The Slaughter Group. It led to clients who wanted me to come in and shape their cultures, writing down core values and having those values shape everything before anything was drawn on paper. It was all based on this idea of the transcendentals, which are beauty and truth and honor. If you create something based on that, people will naturally be drawn to it.
I noticed in your website archives something that caught my attention: the place settings in a corporate dining room. It made me wonder if you literally designed the china.
The marketing director at Regions Bank, which had merged with AmSouth, called and asked if I would come back (as their agency). I said ‘No, but what I’d love to do is help you shape the core values of what Regions is going to be and to create the visual identity.’ They were used to me thinking that way, and the CEO was embracing a lot of the things that I felt like needed to be done, including this idea that every single thing matters.
One day I said, ‘If everything matters, what about your corporate dining room? You have all these people coming in, and you’re using nice plates, but you could find them anywhere.’ He said, ‘Design them, then.’ If you look at that plate, it’s a subtle nod to the Regions logo, with little triangles that go around the platters. It shows attention to detail. If your attention to detail is on your platter, maybe that’s how you’re going to handle your business.
What has inspired your work with LIV?
They called me, so I went over and met with them, and they shared with me what they wanted. I knew they had a nonprofit foundation. That told me where their heart was. I felt like they wanted to make an apartment complex transcend a place to lie your head at night.
At the same time my oldest son had just gone through a divorce and moved to an apartment complex, and it was nice, but it was just a place to sleep. I thought, not everyone is going through a divorce, but everyone is carrying something in their hearts. If they could create an apartment complex that is truly making life better for people at every stage in their lives, I wanted to be a part of that.
You can do it in tangible ways, in how you treat people, but it can also go into the other senses. One of the things I wanted to do with LIV was introduce a scent, so when you walk into any Livano there’s this beautiful fragrance. We also said, ‘Let’s create a coffee shop that is a great brand on its own and not just an afterthought.’ We came up with the name Trapeze. The name says, this is something fresh. They didn’t just get some coffee and put their logo on the cup and on some bags. It’s daring — the daring young man on a flying trapeze.
I wondered if we could end by talking about LIV’s new luxury active-adult development, The Filmont.
When they said they were going to create a new complex to be marketed to people 55 plus, I showed them sketches and handwritten language starting with the line, ‘My life is a paradox.’ Because it is. I’m old, but I’m young. I’m retired, but I’m still active. That was the audience. We wanted to create a place for people who are older and still vibrant and active and want to do life in an amazing way. When I created that DNA, I said I wanted to create a name that’s the same way: The Filmont. It’s classic but modern — it’s traditional, but phonetically it feels kind of edgy. It’s old, but it’s young.
I did a painting at the Filmont, and the painting has all of this massive material that dry and cracking, and the earth is void of life. Then it gets a little softer, and there’s a cast bronze pear. It represents the idea that from the outside we can appear to be advanced in our age, but planted in the right place we can still bear beautiful fruit. I think LIV captured that with the Filmont. When you walk in, it doesn’t feel like an apartment building; it’s appointed more like a boutique hotel. If wanted to go and live in an apartment complex, that would be a place I would live, because that’s the whole spirit of it. We believe everyone who is living here is still bearing fruit and trying to do these great things.
