Month: September 2024

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Posted on by Megan Joyce
Tired of “Millennial grey”, but not quite ready to commit to a brighter hue in your home? (Yep, we got two millennial stereotypes in there.) Not to worry, Colombian paint company Glasst has just the product for you: Unpaint! This innovative, peelable paint applies like every other paint you’re used to, but dries into a film that can be easily removed by hand without damaging the surface. Perfect for renters or frequent redecorators, Unpaint can be used not only on walls, but also on furniture and other surfaces, and it comes in over 5,000 matte-finish colors. It’s also made from biodegradable materials and VOC-free, so we’re waiting to hear that the negatives are!

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Posted on by Teni Hallums

Mergers present a new opportunity to build on the strengths of two companies uniting under one banner. This new entity’s visual identity should stay true to its mission, and in our experience as brand designers, there are three essential things to remember during the rebrand.

We’re sharing some best practices to guide you and your team toward a successful rebrand after a merger.

Set a good foundation for your visual identity by looking at the past

As part of your rebranding strategy, you can gain inspiration from the companies participating in the merger, taking their best qualities and folding them into your brand story. Those positive attributes will help you create a stronger brand identity that connects with customers and builds on the new chapter you’re embarking on.

Here’s how you can begin shaping this story.

– Define and analyze what differentiates the two brands before merging and finding the common denominators.
– Reflect on the deeper story behind why these two companies complemented each other enough to unite.
– Highlight the people who make up the team and their contributions.

Once you know the parts that make up your past, you can create the visual identity that will take your brand into the future.

Get clear on what stakeholders want, and audiences need

When companies merge, there’s a lot of movement as both parties work through the kinks of combining resources and making decisions that will affect the new entity. Sometimes, this results in a push and pull between stakeholders during a rebrand because everyone has their own thoughts about the new visual identity.

And while your company’s decision-makers are essential during this rebranding effort, so are your customers. It only takes a few moments for them to form an impression about a brand and decide whether they want to give it their attention, much less buy from it.

So, there’s pressure to get this rebrand right.

With that in mind, there are a few ways to capture insights from your internal decision-makers and customers so you can provide direction to your design team. This will also enable your team to evaluate the evolution of the visual identity based on data instead of gut feelings.

These are a few of our favorites:

Stakeholder Questionnaires
These forms ask key decision-makers about their likes and dislikes, among other questions. This questionnaire helps to set expectations about what the new brand should convey to its customers.

Customer Interviews
Used as a powerful tool to gain insight into how, why, and what of your customer’s thinking, which can help guide your brand messaging and identity design.

Stakeholder Interviews
Adding to the questionnaires, interviewing stakeholders can help highlight the important insights behind creating the new company.

Using these tools can help you gather the pieces of the larger puzzle that provides a holistic view of your customers and business. With this information, it’s easier to develop a brand identity that encompasses your company’s values and mission.

Design an identity that represents the new brand

We’ve rebranded a lot of businesses, including those that have undergone mergers, and we’ve learned that the people involved in them want to explore design options symbolizing this union.

Part of this includes in this non-exhaustive list:

– Designing descriptive logos that symbolize the brand.
– Choosing brand colors and fonts to create a mood.
– Creating a style guide that defines the creative language your company should learn and follow.

There’s a lot of thought that goes into every color, line, and shape for each of its elements. These components serve as an extension of the brand’s message and how the world should see it.

Ensuring your rebrand is successful post-merger

When rebranding after a merger, the goal should be creating an authentic brand identity for your buyers. To do this, you need the voices of both company stakeholders and customers to define and navigate the development of this new identity.

Their thoughts and guidance are crucial when working with a creative agency to shape the brand. Partnering with a design agency specializing in branding gives you a strategic partner who can bring out the best in this new company. By the time you launch, you’ll have a visual identity designed to reflect the company, its values, and its customers.

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Posted on by Teni Hallums

While every business is unique, there is one thing they all pay attention to. Budget. It’s something our agency is sensitive to, and it’s the reason why we work closely with clients to give them design solutions that optimize their project budget.

We also advise them about steps they can take to save money on design and production without sacrificing quality. Now, we’ll share a few of our top recommendations to help control costs and prevent project costs from exploding.

Stay within your allotted revisions

Whether it’s a company rebrand or a logo design, a certain number of edits are included for every project. On average, this can range between two to four rounds of revisions, and each edit beyond this would have an additional cost.

A cap on edits helps streamline the review and feedback process and reduce costs while reducing the amount of back and forth during a design or branding project.

Here are a few ways to do it:

– During the discovery process, give your design team as much information about your company, likes, dislikes, etc., as possible.

– Gather, consolidate, and finalize the feedback from your team into one doc.

– Have one point of contact who is responsible for communicating with their project account manager.

– Be decisive and descriptive with your response as you review creative. (e.g., Instead of saying, “I don’t like these colors,” think about why something does or doesn’t work in the design: “The color combination in this logo doesn’t work because it looks similar to one of our indirect competitors.”)

Having a set number of revisions helps keep the project moving forward so you and your team can continue marketing the business without losing a step.

Provide high-quality assets to your creative team

Designers often request logos, photography, and other assets to produce ads and marketing campaigns. When the assets your company provides have issues, they can add unexpected fees because of the extra time involved in fixing them or rebuilding them entirely.

Let’s go over two of the most common issues that can occur with assets.

Blurry images
The lower the resolution of an image, the blurrier it is. Low-resolution images contain less detail, so they cannot be edited or resized without significantly reducing their quality.

Incorrect file formats
File type matters. For example, the best file types to reproduce logos for print are vector file formats such as .eps or .ai. They can be easily scaled up or down without deforming the logo. But if the logo is provided as a .png or .jpg file, it will be made up of pixels, which can degrade the image’s quality as it’s resized.

Giving your design team the raw asset files gives them more flexibility to correct the problems without spending more time reconstructing the files. And when in doubt, your designers can tell you exactly which formats would work best for your project.

Plan out your content in advance

Printed brochures, direct mail pieces, and newsletters are still used by businesses to promote their brands. Some of the most common ways to save money on printing include choosing lighter paper weights and cheaper finishes.

However, there’s one thing you have to do upfront to make the path from design to press straightforward: planning and organizing your content.

Knowing what copy and imagery you want to use in your printed pieces will help your designer and printer estimate design and production costs. This becomes especially important with larger documents like catalogs and brochures where deviating from an estimated page count can become prohibitively expensive.

Adhere to your design project schedule

During your initial conversations with your creative team, you’ll discuss specific milestones to meet and set expectations for the design project. Sticking to this project schedule is one of the easiest ways to prevent costs from ballooning.

But, when issues like delays in feedback or delivery of assets and eleventh-hour edits occur, this puts more pressure on the creative team to scramble at the last minute. In addition, it can also increase the number of people needed to meet the same milestones and deadlines if they remain unchanged.

The best way to mitigate this is by working closely with your project or account manager to communicate any red flags that could impact the timeline so your design team can form a new action plan.

Getting the most out of your design budget

Most businesses allocate a limited portion of their total marketing budget, meaning they have to make the most of those resources. When partnering with a creative team, they can guide you in the right direction so you can produce marketing materials while working within your budget.

Planning ahead can mitigate many of the most common issues impacting design projects. Knowing what you want, having the right assets, and communicating internally and externally will help you avoid headaches and sticker shock.

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Posted on by Megan Joyce
There’s a new color perception test on the block: “Is My Blue Your Blue?”, developed by neuroscience and AI researcher Patrick Mineault, asks participants to explore the differences in how individual people perceive color. It’s more than you might think! The experiment draws back the curtain on the surprisingly subjective nature of color perception: did you know factors like culture, language, and even time of day can alter how we see shades of blue and green? For instance, while some may see turquoise as definitively “green”, others would disagree completely and call it “blue”. The test also gives some background on the history of color perception, particularly that blue was absent from ancient texts, which suggests that color recognition evolves with language. It’s “the dress” all over again!

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Posted on by Megan Joyce
At the intersection of graphic design and science, branding arrives to play a critical role in communicating complex, abstract and very, very important ideas. For designers, this offers an exciting challenge: how to represent scientific concepts through logos and visual identities. Historically, science relied on symbols of authority (like a wax seal) to lend credibility, like the seal of the University of Heidelberg example in the full article. In an intriguing contrast, modern science institutions often use minimalist, abstract visuals to symbolize scientific principles, like Los Alamos Laboratory’s very midcentury modern, atomic-age-design logo. But no matter how complicated or simple, these examples demonstrate how branding can make science accessible and engaging, and lot more fun…for graphic designers, anyway!

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Posted on by Megan Joyce
Type designer Jessica Walsh’s new venture, Type of Feeling, is set to transform the way we think about typography by linking fonts directly to emotions. Yea, you read that right. Whether we like it or not, forms already evoke certain feelings: hard lines can prompt stress or aggression, and curves usually make you think of softer emotions, like calmness or nostalgia. This new approach could significantly impact design by emphasizing the emotional resonance of typefaces, moving beyond aesthetics to add emotionality as a purposeful design trait. Designers are always trying to create more immersive and emotionally engaging experiences, and Type of Feeling’s emotionally-driven typefaces offer a new tool for the toolkit for crafting designs that connect on a deeper, more personal level.