N26 Brand Book —
how we got started and maintain it
A refined brand identity
About one year ago, we launched our, by then, largest campaign “26reasons”. This was also the first time everybody came into contact with our new brand voice and visual identity that we had worked on over the last months. We introduced a refined logo, a larger and more human set of colours, and typography that captured our transition from a still relatively young organisation into a more mature brand that is globally recognisable and has a unique voice and visual language.
Soon after we launched the campaign, we set out to communicate these changes to every team within N26. We wanted to find a way that creates visibility around what we did and explains why we did it. This way everyone could incorporate our thinking behind it into their everyday practice.
What we needed was brand consistency. This is when we decided that we need a document that can work as a source of truth and expression of our personality: the brandbook.
From our customer support, marketing and research teams to external agencies, we all base our objectives around our users. We think a lot about how we talk to people, what journeys we want to take them on, and how we can create a thoughtful and easy-to-use product for them. To do this effectively, it is important to share the same understanding and vision of our brand, as well as being able to use the visual parts of our brand in a way that feels familiar and intentional.
The opportunity to scale
A brandbook is essentially a collection of guidelines and pieces of advice on how to use our identity in a consistent and holistic way. Those individual pieces can be small details, but when they come together as intended, they form a system that gives us the opportunity to scale what we‘re doing in a way that still works in many years. At the same time, it gives us enough room to refine and continuously evolve our brand while we are moving forward by adding new parts and layers do our identity. By constantly evolving ourselves we stay relevant and exciting for our users and give ourselves, as an in-house design team, the room to experiment and discover new ways of expressing our brand.
Defining the process
The first point was to get inspired. So we went back in time to look at how others did it long before us. Luckily we have a well-equipped design library with many great resources that we could pull inspiration and knowledge from. We studied our favorite brand manuals by NASA, IBM, and many more and were continuously blown away by the level of detail and consistency they showed.
Now we knew where to go but not how to get there.
While designing for the individual needs of the organisation, we also needed to define a clear process that allowed all members of the brand design team to involve themselves and contribute with their expertise and learnings from past experiences. It was important to also keep other teams involved in the creation process by working closely together and asking as many questions as we could. We discussed our expectations, where we see potential roadblocks, defined what needs to go into our Version 1 and when teams can expect us to share the first results with them.
As we went ahead, we started laying out an overall content structure to break down our intentions into smaller pieces that individual brand designers could take on.
- Who we are
- What we stand for
- How we talk
- How we look
- How we move
- How we sound
A three-phase rollout plan, that spanned over the following months was put in place to cover all the topics. Each of the phases were approached with a different method and rhythm. This helped the entire team to still stay close to a single topic while individually being able to add context and ideas to others.
Phase 1: MVP (1 week)
Phase 2: V1 Digital brand guidelines (3 weeks)
Phase 3: V2 Printed brand guidelines (2 months)
Phase1 — The MVP
We concentrated purely on the parts of our branding that are most relevant for the larger organisation such as:
→ New Logo
→ New brand colours
→ New typography
This helped to create the first touchpoints with our new branding and established a baseline for the larger, more specific topics that we wanted to get started on next. Each designer fully dedicated themselves to one topic for one week. At the end of week one we shared the document alongside a resource depository with all the assets we prepared so everybody could easily access and start working with our visual brand immediately.
Phase 2 — V1 Digital brand guidelines
We continued by sectioning each of the larger topics into smaller bits that individual designers could work on. For that, we switched up the roles of each designer on a weekly basis to get a more holistic understanding of how these sets of guidelines are connected and worked with each other.
Logo Structure example:
→ Placement
→ Clear space
→ Minimum size
→ Colour usage
→ Best practices
In a weekly check-in meeting we presented our results and discussed open questions, gave feedback and filled gaps where information was missing. By the end of this month we had built a solid brand foundation.
The design team then introduced the brand guidelines to smaller groups of people in individual sessions where we opened up the room for discussion and talked about how certain parts of our branding system connect to their specific function in the company and how they can use them to their advantage. We showed how they can utilize our new colour palette, typography, icons and images in an easy and understandable way to reflect the tone of voice and story of N26 on an ongoing basis.
Phase 3 — V2 Printed brand guidelines
Once our brand guidelines were available for everyone, we started to see people using it in exciting ways and being inspired by the new possibilities they were given to express our brand.
We used this opportunity to take a moment to breathe and reflect on the work that was done during the last month and how we wanted to move forward by making these brand guidelines a physical object we can give out to people. We are still considering the final form this will have and how to get it into the hands of everyone.
What's next
As we designed these guidelines to be a living dynamic document that will capture how our brand evolves through the upcoming months and years, we continue to add missing pieces to it as we move forward. We are currently documenting our internal photography art direction, refining the usage of our new illustrations, and expanding on how we treat typography by making it more of a flexible system to give all designers the opportunity to express their projects’ specific needs with it.
We are also looking at innovative and future-proof ways (and tools) for sharing this always-growing documentation internally and externally to make it as easily accessible and understandable as possible.
Learnings
For us, it was very important to have a clearly defined strategy and roadmap that we could rely on. Every team member needed to be aligned and transparent about their commitment to the project to be able to stay on course and ensure the weekly results we set ourselves up to.
Since we decided to have each designer on a new topic every week, we all managed to get a more holistic view of our brand, but also relied heavily on each other. Only this way were we able to create a system that is cohesive from each angle you look at it.
Creating brand guidelines is only the first step. The real challenge lies in maintaining and improving them to keep up with the development of a fast-growing organisation.
Conclusion
Throughout this journey we began to understand how brand guidelines are not a set of rules. They are pieces of advice and best practices to support and empower others to use the brand in ways that are most useful to them. As we go along and grow as an organisation and design team it is important to stay aligned and consistent but also to stay open for criticism, to continuously challenge our own decisions and to rethink them when needed. Our brand is now set up in a position for continued evolution.
Designers/Contributors:
Christian Hertlein (Head of Design)
Julia de Meo, Todd Wilson, Greer Chapman, Maja Tisel, János Spindler
(Brand Design)
Interested in joining our Design team as we grow?
If you’d like to join us on the journey of building the mobile bank the world loves to use, have a look at some of the roles we’re looking for here.
