Building a Creative Backbone
Branding is about more than just an image—it's about creating a visceral experience for the customer. It's about embodying a set of values that people want to be part of, and it's about telling the story of what you do in a way that connects with your audience.
But too often companies (SaaS in particular) under-utilize the creative process, deferring to speed and the safety of sameness. Yes, you could throw some shapes on a page with circular type (or just literally copy your competition like most of our segment does—dots and hand-drawn gestures anyone?). But like Malcom Grear said, “Every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong. A problem worthy of the name is seldom accessible to sudden and simple solution."
It’s not easy to go after something unique. Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Phillips say in their book Graphic Design, The New Basics (2nd Ed.) “Try to move away from automatic, easily conceived notions. Pursue surprising results that compel us with their originality. Iteration, dissection, synthesis, revision and representation — a level of immersion that yields unexpected and profound return on the creative investment.”
And these two authors are not wrong. The McKinsey report in 2018 reported that companies that invested in good design had 32% more revenue and 56% more total returns to shareholders. They are stats to make us stop and think for a moment. They are stats that ignited our team to propose and sell an extensive creative development process that would ensure originality, interest and ultimately a killer brand.
To start the process, we created a Brand Framework that synthesized the business’ strategy and its unique market opportunities. It nailed down the vision, personality, customer profiles and market position in a concise way, creating a foundation for our team to connect successfully to the objectives of the business. ‘Design for design’s sake’ was not an option. Design was here to make an impact.
Next, we conducted visual explorations to see how we could represent the company vision and new market positioning we laid out in the framework. We explored representation and inspiration across typography, color, movement, imagery, style. I asked designers to hold nothing back. What were they seeing, what inspired them, what did they feel was communicative of the narrative we were trying to tell (the team brought art, imagery, landscapes, compositions). We distilled this exploration into three unique conceptual directions, each capable of delivering on the goals of the rebrand. We desired to give the leadership team options and showcase that the brand could come alive in multiple different forms.
Section of the team’s exploration
The team eventually landed on the concept we called “Human realism that drives relational trust”. This route focused on realism and clarity in the photography and video with no filters standing between the imagery and the viewer. It also relied heavily on unmodified truth. The direction sought to deliver the clarity, transparency and authenticity from fellow humans that we knew our customers craved, all while putting individual personalities on display.
We took this idea and moved into creating 3 distinct design styles that could represent the concept while achieving differentiation, market trust and customer affinity. Each of these directions was tested with the team and customers, where we used the data to help identify positives and negatives in each concept and ultimately craft our final direction.
Three starting design iterations (combinations of these would eventually become our final style)
Data and testing results led us to further iteration and refinement which enabled us to expand our concepts into an ownable system of colors, patterns, type treatments, icons, and photography that would define our visual presence across marketing and product. The final brand style was complete! It focused on human-centric photography with realistic professionals showcasing unique personalities (a photoshoot we produced ourselves that over-emphasized facial gestures and body movement), supported by conceptual forms that told a narrative of connection and communication. Color mimicked a range of natural tones highlighting our brand’s human focus, while staying fun with a vibrant and modernized orange. Blues were implemented to help us go up-market and finally, a foundry font was chosen to give us distinction and enable a truly human-centered experience with its hyper-legible characteristics.
Final visual system
Through such extensive creative work, the new visual direction is more expressive, trust-worthy, differentiated and human. The creative development practices allowed us to move beyond the expected and open up new opportunities for a company like ours in our segment. The rebrand is still fresh and many of our experience touchpoints have not been restyled, but the new design is starting to prove it’s worth–our rebranded homepage is already yielding 3x the engagement. Proof to the idea that good design is always worth the risk.