The story behind Credder’s rebrand
Exploring ways to visualize credibility and Credder’s exciting new look
Credder has become the world’s leading news review platform — trying to hold media accountable with a decentralized way of rating articles, authors, and outlets. Since 2018, the company has been working on an easy and frictionless user experience for news consumers that helps them identify credible information and sources while avoiding time-wasting clickbait and misinformation.
This product’s heart beats for content and source credibility, and we had the impression that the brand was not being as assertive as it could be. So, we decided to investigate.
In 2021, we heard about how Credder's visual identity was perceived by our community. After rounds of feedback sessions, we understood it was time for a real change.
Why a rebrand?
Because we identified problems with our logo and rating icons that profoundly affected the user experience with our products. The most painful points:
1. Too few people understood the logo
Our original logo was a cheese icon, supposed to help people rhyme Credder with Cheddar to make the name catchy and draw on our connection with another popular review site featuring food in the score icons - Rotten Tomatoes.
2. It was difficult to understand the meaning of the cheese-based score icons
The score icons used to show the credibility of articles, authors, and outlets were yellow and green, representing gold and moldy cheddar cheese-relating to the cheese logo universe. Gold was a yellow cheese and represented a good score. Mold was green cheese and represented a bad score. In general, audiences understand green as an expression of positive feedback, success, guaranteed, safe, and good. The color yellow can be understood to represent gold if it is shown in a universe of awards, medals, trophies, and rare earth metals, but not when talking about cheese as we had been using it.
How we rebranded
Undergoing a rebrand, no matter how necessary it may be, can be a very time-consuming process. We needed to evaluate all of our touch-points with users, customers, and the public and make sure that every single encounter across any of our products was leading with a clear, meaningful, and precise message about who we are and what we do.
We had 2 goals in mind:
- The logo should express the measurement of credibility and should be easily recognized on third-party platforms where users might see our scores next to content. It also needed to work well with light and dark backgrounds, large and small scales, and whether in color or black and white — just as any well-constructed logo usually does.
- The score icons should be easy to understand, leaving no room for confusion when displayed in color or even for colorblind people.
The process
I usually adapt the design process depending on the project’s need, but I understand all methods are derived from the famous basic structure of the precious double diamond. n this case, I had the help of Credder’s CEO Chase Palmieri with me for every step of the process, which helped make our decisions more assertive. Our steps were:
- User Researching: listen to Credder’s existing community of users, customers, friends, advisors, and investors.
- Benchmarking: understand how other players in our space communicate their brands while examining logos and design concepts we love from companies and products outside of our space.
- Brainstorming: bring up words and concepts typically associated with credibility, reputation, news media, reviews, scores, and measurement.
- Defining: with a lot of ideas to consider, this stage was important to focus and define what would ultimately become our core brand.
5. Visualizing: explore visual ideas related to the core concepts selected and develop a visual universe.
6. Asking for feedback and iterating, iterating, iterating.
7. Implement it. Now that we have our new brand, it’s time to announce it to the world and let it take over all of our existing products and pages. This is the fun part, watching the new brand grow up and take on a life of its own!
After almost a year of studies and contributions from people worldwide, we explored many different visual concepts related to credibility that offered a more user-friendly, easy-to-understand universe for Credder. It was a long journey to get us here… and finally: welcome to Credder, again.
The new brand
The new logo looks more lively, digital, sharp, and professional. It’s a lot brighter and more colorful, but also very playful and straightforward. And hopefully, it feels more credible and welcoming- encouraging new users to come and engage in the news review process.
The logo icon is a “Credibility Meter”, with a pointer, and in the shape of a letter “C” for Credder. It’s a thermometer for credibility and a unique stand-alone icon to recognize the brand.
The typography chosen was Montserrat, and we stick with lower case to make the icon more prominent.
The new icons
The scores are red, yellow, and green — as obvious as they can get color-wise— and the icons have pointers to make sure everybody can understand we’re talking about high quality, average, or low-quality articles, authors, and outlets.
Takeaways from our process
Here are the biggest takeaways from our lengthy design process:
1. Seek honest feedback. Sometimes it comes from your designer’s friends or family, and brave people who don’t care about hurting someone’s ego. Finding those individuals who are not afraid to say that something you designed is ugly or useless is exactly what you need to undergo a rebrand that delivers results at the end.
2. Give yourselves time to rethink your preferences, especially when settling on the brand’s concept. Sleep on new ideas and shapes that you’re not sure about. Sometimes our intuition and subconscious surprise you with thoughts and concepts that seem to come out of nowhere and work. Let your concepts breathe and make space for new ideas to pop into your end as you go about your normal day.
3. Test the universe before moving forward. A solid logo needs to support a broader brand universe. In our case, ff the score icons looked disconnected from the logo, they wouldn’t have worked and we would have had to restart and explore another visual- which happened multiple times.
4. Circle back to the core identity often. Remember what brought you to the rebranding process in the first place. Write down why you’re doing this and what the end product should accomplish. As time goes by, we can feel tired of exercising so many different solutions, and easily lose focus on the core concepts, results, and limitations we’re looking to conquer.
5. Close the circle as you move forward. Be sure to have clear decision-makers who can solidify changes and propagate them across the team.
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We wanted to make Credder’s overall look and feel just as credible and easy to engage with as our ever-improving product experiences. We hope this new look helps everyone enjoy Credder just a bit more.
You can check the final result online at credder.com, and feel free to let us know your thoughts about our rebrand!
Feedback is always welcome :)
