Behind the Scenes: Chatbooks Brand Refresh
By Megan Klein, Brand Director
7-some years ago, a small team launched Chatbooks with a simple idea: make it beyond easy to print your family’s photos. Over the years, the products we sell — and the technology that powers them — have evolved. Along the same lines, we wanted our brand to continue to reflect the community we serve, and that meant it was time for a refresh. Just like our skinny jeans of 2014 have evolved into the “mom jeans” we’re trying out today, it was time to update our look while staying true to the DNA of our core brand elements.
In this post I’m going to share a peek behind the scenes: how we approached the process, decisions we made along the way, and yes, the final results! Ultimately, we wanted that fresh, easy feeling of a new haircut, and I think that’s where we landed: looking like a fresh version of the Chatbooks we know and love, with an extra bounce in our step.
Step 1: Decide What to Refresh
A Brand is more than design and what people see visually—it includes our mission and how people feel when they interact with us. From their first touch point–whether that’s an ad, a meme on Instagram, or a website visit–to opening their first book, to receiving their 100 Club t-shirt, to the engagement with our founders—the look and feel is what makes us Chatbooks.
For this update we were keeping all of our core values (like Beyond Easy, Amazing Service, Fun, and Family) the same, and continuing to connect with the same audience (mainly millennial moms), so we approached this as a Brand Refresh. We wanted to evolve our visual brand, not completely reinvent ourselves.
In this case, we wanted to change our logo, update our color palette, and add a new brand typeface. We also wanted to update our tagline to a mantra that would inspire both our team and our community (you can read more from our founders about our new tagline, See the Magic Every Day, here). We wanted to share this updated look and feel across all company touchpoints, including marketing channels and messaging, packaging, product, app, etc.
Step 2: Assemble the Team
We have an incredible design team in-house at Chatbooks, but since we don’t spend our days obsessing about logos and the emotions and connotations they can evoke, we wanted to consult with an expert. We reached out to a logo designer whose work we deeply admire, Jessica Hische, and she consulted with us throughout the process. (And yes, we did this all over Zoom!)
While the brand design team took the lead on research and exploration, we wanted the input from other team members as well: our founders, executive team, UX team, and marketing team all offered insight and weighed in throughout the process.
Step 3: Explore Logo Variations
We started with the logo since it’s such a foundational brand piece, and the refreshed logo would then set the tone for the rest of the brand design elements, like color and typefaces.
The term logo is an umbrella term consisting of three elements: a wordmark (Chatbooks); a symbol (in our case, we call them “chat bubbles”); and a lockup that combines the wordmark and symbol, plus the tagline in some cases.
As we were getting started, Jessica Hische told us that great logos pass The Swag Test: would your employees and community wear a t-shirt or carry a tote bag with your logo? We had a shock of recognition: we couldn’t remember the last time we had put our actual logo on our company swag. We often used fun, of-the-moment fonts to write out Chatbooks, but we hadn’t put our logo on a t-shirt in years. The bar was set — we knew our new logo was a success if it passed the swag test.
We began by critiquing the current logo to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Keeping the strengths from the original logo not only creates a great starting point for exploration, but will help the new logo feel familiar. Identifying the weaknesses will give the team clear guidelines to reference and ultimately give cause to the logo refresh–there needs to be a reason you are up-leveling the logo.
We performed this exercise across many teams–brand designers, social media and community teams, UX designers, and the executive team–to ensure we had a wide variety of feedback. Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses we identified in our original logo:
Our design team went to the drawing board, and explored dozens of options.
We coalesced around three main areas, all with very different feels:
- Option 1: Similar to our current logo with a few refinements
- Option 2: Dialing up the personality and femininity
- Option 3: Adding a fun, handwritten feel
All three options kept the strengths and addressed many, if not all, of the weaknesses we had identified.
We presented these directions to Chatbooks stakeholders, and Option 2 was a clear favorite. We took that base and began to refine it and make every pixel work harder. Design nerds will appreciate some of the little things we considered: for example, the curve from the chat bubble was taken over to replace the bases of the h and k to add consistency. The double oos are tilted to represent books leaning on a shelf.
A key thing we wanted was an icon that could separate from the wordmark and stand on its own. The previous icon was comprised of two chat bubbles that were offset and meant to look like an open book. The new icon shifts the bubble composition to have the right side higher, more like the action of opening and flipping a book page. The left side now reads as a recognizable chat icon (chat), while the right side is a book page to represent photo books (book).
Step 4: Update Colors and Typeface
Colors
We had two main goals for our color refresh: 1) to be a colorful, fun brand and 2) to make all brand assets clearly recognizable as Chatbooks.
A good, comprehensive palette consists of a collection of dominant, neutral and accent colors that work together in any combination. In the past, we had our core brand color Chatty Green, plus an additional four brand colors. We added in tints and shades of each of those colors, resulting in a 25 color brand palette. While we had a great range to work with, we also felt we were watering down our brand’s impact.
For the refresh, we limited ourselves to a color palette of seven colors in hopes of making the Chatbooks brand more recognizable. Choosing colors is a daunting task–there are around 10 million options!–so how did we go about it? We began by finding colors that played well with Chatty Green. They had to have equal visual weight and vibrancy to be seen as main brand colors. We wanted the brand to feel more feminine and personable, so we steered away from the blues, greens, and blacks used so much in “big tech” branding.
We added two more dominant colors, a blavendar (a blue and purple mix) and a pink. These three together paint us as a colorful, bright, and optimistic brand.
Next we moved on to neutral colors. Black is the most common neutral color, but because we wanted to signal that our brand is warm and inclusive, we went with a cream and a dark plum as our neutrals. Finally, we chose a bright highlighter yellow as an accent color. It rounds out the personality of the palette and lets us add emphasis and excitement in small doses.
Typeface
Prior to the brand refresh, we had one brand typeface, Circular Pro, that we used across all channels. We loved the open characters, easy legibility, and friendliness of the classic typeface. Over the years we have seen Circular Pro grow in popularity among tech brands (hi, Spotify!). So we wanted to add another typeface that would pair nicely with our current font, but would add more personality to our consumer + tech brand.
After ruling out dozens of serif fonts for characteristics such as too editorial, fancy, silly, narrow, illegible, etc. we landed on adding two serif fonts–Bookmania and P22 Mackinac Pro. We chose Bookmania for headlines: with an extensive library of glyphs (which are fancy options for each letter), and a similar x-height, and letter width of Circular Pro, we knew the two would pair well together in headline and subcopy combinations. There were some drawbacks to using Bookmania as our body copy font, so we chose P22 Mackinac Pro as our body copy font for the same reasons we continue to use Circular Pro–open characters, easy legibility, and friendliness.
Step 5: Roll Out the Refreshed Brand!
After final sign-off from the executive team and buy-in from the teams who had been helping all throughout the process, it was time to share and celebrate with a company-wide Town Hall. We took everyone through the journey of our brand elements, from the first logo iterations 7+ years ago to the refreshed look you see here today.
Then the next stage of work really began: updating the brand everywhere! There are over 500 touchpoints we needed to update, so we began by creating a list of places/assets that would need a new logo and design refresh. We prioritized high impact moments, where we have the most eyes and attention from our audience: app, website, email template, packaging, and social media.
Finally, we made sure to (literally) pass the Swag Test. We designed a fun, colorful box with our new brand elements, and sent it out to all team members. Inside: a t-shirt with our new logo and, to keep it weird, a pair of Chatty Green crocs.
