Refreshing Our Great Big Brand
It was time to make a change. And not just the small changes we always make — something more substantial. The first step in the next evolution of Great Big Story.
First, a little context.
It’s been just over two years since we started Great Big Story (well, we launched publicly in October 2015, but of course were building well before). Things have been going really well (we just crossed a million YouTube followers!), and with that success comes change and evolution. Our brand has grown into itself. When we started this company, we built the branding before we even had a piece of content complete. We built our graphics package at the same time the first pieces were being shot. It was a fun, natural evolution. We tried things, some worked and some didn’t.
Since then, we are on our second official graphics package launch, with monthly (or more) updates and tweaks to keep the package efficient for our editors and producers. Our brand hasn’t evolved much — we’ve added some new colors to our palette, but mostly we’ve relied on the system we created on day one.
Today we launch the latest evolution of our brand. This is phase one of two of our brand update; the next phase will be appearing in the coming month. This is the initial update — we are swapping typefaces on our sites & apps, in our logo and in our graphics package.
So overall, this is a typeface swap. But of course, it’s not that easy. We are also actively solving for new challenges and growth the brand is seeing.
Let’s start with the logo. Here’s a before and after.
The typeface now more closely represents our brand — it feels fun, engaging and has personality. DIN, our previous choice, lacked this emotion (it was literally designed for industrial uses in Germany in 1931 — the epitome of lacking in personality). It was time for our type choice to more accurately reflect the personality of our brand. The new typeface is Platform by Commercial Type. It’s got just the right amount of personality and quirk, sort of like our videos.
We are, of course, keeping the rocket. The rocket lives in our red dot, and now our typeface more accurately reflects the circular shapes of the red dot. There is rhythm to the mark in the circular repetition that we didn’t have before.
We’ve switched up the scale in most applications (although we are temporarily suspending this rule for the current website, I’ll get to that in the next post). By making the rocket icon relatively smaller than the type, we can build a sense of scale, and make GREAT BIG STORY feel.. well, BIG.
We’ve also created another fun aspect to the logo you’ll start to see — the logo is responsive. Below any size where the rocket doesn’t read properly, we switch to a red dot. We love that this dot references recording lights, on air lights, record buttons — all the video recording references.
This brings me to the graphics package. Along with a handful of technical changes behind the scenes to make this package more efficient for our producers and editors, we’ve made a couple bigger shifts. Mostly we’ve just swapped typefaces, but there are two new elements I want to call out.
The first is our bug.
Previously, our bug on every video was our rocket. Great in theory. See the rocket, know the rocket, love the rocket.. right up until that’s all a viewer retains from watching a video, and tries to look up “video story rocket icon” on Google, and it doesn’t go very well for them. Or us. We needed to be more clear about who we are — so you’ll see our bug now contains our name. Any time you are watching one of our pieces, you’ll always get some brand recall. Oh, and we’re using that responsive version of the logo I mentioned previously.
Another big shift is our title slate for series. We’ve created a lot of series in the past couple years, but we weren’t getting great recall on them. So we made a decision to prioritize the series name rather than the episode name in the title slate.
I can hear you gasping — another typeface? I thought we went through this part of the article already. Well, we’ve also added a tertiary typeface for special uses. It’s Druk by Commercial Type. We are using it in specialty situations only — things like series names and film titles.
That’s it. Phase one. Phase two later.
Our brand is a living thing, that exists mostly digitally — this means we are constantly nudging, constantly improving and finding things that work and things that don’t. The nature of our work means we can evolve organically and always be at the ready to solve for new growth. Speaking of new growth — we’ll be announcing some major updates across our digital products and more brand evolution, so, you know, get excited.
Got thoughts or feelings? Let’s talk branding and design — hit me up on twitter: @benwhitla
Ben Whitla
VP Executive Creative Director, Great Big Story
