Brand Refresh Update

When we first mentioned about our upcoming brand refresh, we were keeping a close eye on the progress of Exo Sans, a Kickstarter project by Natanael Gama.

Since then, the funding steadily grew and we were glad to see that on the 26th December, the project reached it’s funding goal. We’ve been sent our advance copies of the font, and are currently in the process of playing around with ideas for our logo and brand image.

If all goes to plan, we’ll hopefully see the font available on Google Web Fonts sometime during February.

So What’s Gonna Change?

Well, as we mentioned before, the biggest change will probably come in the form of typefaces. We’re aiming to make all our copy a little bit nicer to read—both in readability and appearance.

Though we’re still in the early stages of experimentation, we’re also looking at our image as a whole: colours, shapes and forms, icons, and overall design principles.

Of course, when you do anything like this, consistency is key. Our last major brand change was in 2009, and we’ve realised that some of our existing customer-facing material has become dissimilar in some regards, so we’d like to fix that. These are the areas we’ll be looking at:

• Print
  • Stationery
    • Letterhead
    • Business Cards
    • Compliment Slip
    • Envelope
    • Presentation Folder
  • Marketing
    • Leaflets & Mailers
    • Magazine Ads
    • Trade Pack for new Trade customers
  • Letters from our Accounts dept.
• Online
  • Our Websites
    • Our main website
    • Our Trade website
    • Our blog
    • Our artwork upload service at WeTransfer
  • Email
    • Generated email from our websites and order processing system
    • Direct email from a team member
  • Third-party Websites and Social Networks
    • Google+
    • Facebook
    • Twitter

How and When’s it Gonna Happen?

As we always have done, we’ll be doing the design work in-house ourselves. We’re only dedicating a certain amount of time and a few members of our design team to this, so it may take a few months for our planned changes to be fully implemented and rolled out while any old designs and materials are phased out, especially while we’re working on other (exciting) projects. Some of the changes won’t take long at all, while others will likely depend on stocks of our current print material and when we’ll be needing more.

It’ll definitely be an ongoing process, but we’re building a set of design principles and constraints for ourselves to cover all future work across all mediums. This will aid the creation of new designs and help keep our image unified and consistent in the future.

We’re very excited with the ideas we’ve got floating around here, so we’ll be sure to keep you posted on any interesting news here on the blog.