Design for startups: what we’ve learned from our radical rebranding.
How we kept our design up to date and focused in a process of constant evolution.
A startup is, by definition, constantly evolving and this could be very complex aspect to keep up from a design perspective: if the focus of the product changes, all the communication tools the company uses should change too. This is the story of how our logo evolved, the before and after of a startup that was born as a travel agency and ended up offering unique experiences with celebrities.
At the beginning, BidAway was planned to be a platform through which users could bid for luxury hotel rooms, cruises, holiday packages. The logo consisted of Sans-Serif fonts and a palm tree, which looked clean and contemporary, depicting the idea of “Holidays”. However, we changed our path and we felt it was not the best interpretation of our business nature; we turned out to be a platform that allows users to participate — through real-time online auctions and sweepstakes — to win “Unique Experiences”, instead of auctioning luxury experiences.
And by “Unique”, we really mean it, the point is that with the same amount of money normally users could only get a bus ticket (let’s say $10), they get the chance to win an all-inclusive round trip to somewhere in the world to meet their favorite celebrities and spend an unforgettable time with them.
For this reason, we decided to introduce the idea of “Upgrading” in our logo.
The process
To design our new logo, we counted with the support of Yiying Lu, an award-winning designer with more than 10 years of experience in the field. Yiying is known — among many other projects—for being the artist behind Twitter’s old famous Fail Whale. She did a great rebranding job, and honestly we learnt a lot from Yiying. According to her, keywords are important branding messages, which are the key differentiation of BidAway’s business from competitors, which needs to be articulated and reflected through its visual form: its logo, its color, its typography, its branding voice.
And this was the result
Creating a Serif logotype with beautifully modulated strokes and a stylized crown symbol, to convey the notion of “Unique Experience”. In addition, the crown is made of three arrows going upwards, symbolizing “Upgrading”.
In conclusion, rebranding is not a simple task, but for a constantly evolving, ever-changing startup it’s a necessity. A brand is more than just a name, a logo, colors and typography; it is the personality of the company and so it must grow and evolve with it, following it’s new purposes and scopes. This could mean changing the entire visual element — like what we did — or even changing the very name by which users have come to know the company — for example, think of Snapchat becoming ‘Snap’ — . It’s a though call, one of many in the startup world, so you have make sure that all these new elements are going in the right directions — professionals can surely help with this issue ;)— but in the end, your communication and marketing are surely going to benefit from it.
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