We updated our brand…here’s why

We all know that a brand is like an individual fingerprint. No two are alike…unless of course it is ripped off, but that is another post we will cover at a later time and date. This post will cover the rebranding efforts of Mossio, a creative digital agency, the struggles and the reasons behind why we did it.

Mossio has been helping brands with their digital strategy since August of 2014. During that time, even though we had a solidified brand mark, core values which propelled our success, and legitimate partners that wanted design work, we never really thought we had a strong digital voice, or even a meaningful brand. Which is probably why we’ve had so many website design changes over the years. I know, it’s ironic…a digital strategy agency that wasn’t too keen on their own brand. One of the reasons for this is because of our accelerated start we had launching our new agency in 2014. We had a high demand, so high that we couldn’t even get our own website done until 6 months later in 2015.

With so much demand on our plate from partners looking to improve their brand, their interfaces and digital experiences, our own brand took a backseat, and when it was time for us to do it, we had to cram it together with client work, and every Friday, which we take off to explore team growth.

With that said, we made a few mistakes with consistency in our voice, messaging and overall vibe. We felt the logo was powerful, but the message behind each design iteration wasn’t as powerful.

We noticed inconsistencies throughout the websites that we designed for our agency like:

• Different style messaging for case studies.
• Voice inconsistencies from page to page. We noticed the writing style was different for each new site design we came out with for Mossio.
• Imagery differences which didn’t align with other parts of the pages.
• So on and so on.

A new brand we must

After going through 8 different variations of drastically different style web design updates for our agency in just 3 and a half years, we decided that we needed to focus more on unifying our voice and messaging, and connecting it to our core values rather than just focusing on our core values and connecting it through design. We wanted to encompass everything that makes us who we are, and showcase that through design, but also put our culture through our voice and messaging. So we did just that, but there were struggles, just like anything else.

One of the biggest struggles that we faced was changing our logo mark. We have built a reputation on being an agency that creates high quality designs for websites and user interfaces, and people know us from our logo. So changing that was a very difficult decision for us. Could we have just kept our logo, sure we could…but at the end of the day we didn’t feel that it went with our true voice and messaging, it just didn’t match up. Our old logo felt bold, portraying a playful sense. While our new updated logo mark feels more elegant and luxury style. Our old logo also never had a text based version, for some reason, there wasn’t a typeface that went well with it. Our new logo mark goes really great with our text based logo which we also feel encompasses our cultural vibe along with our bold and elegant style.

And with that, we have a new brand

We have accomplished so much in the past 5 months of building our new brand, website, and constructing new ways to do things, and boy does it feel good!

We have a brand spanking new logo mark which we are in love with, a new color palette that showcases a more mature look and feel, all these wrapped up with all new voice and messaging that is consistent and based on our culture, vibe and views. We definitely went all out of our comfort zone on this one, and we believe it turned out great and will pay off in major ways.

We are also doing more things this year that will allow us to give more back to the design industry and become more involved with fellow designers. Things like a Mossio podcast, and live design sessions with actual projects we’re working on for brands over YouTube Live and Facebook Live. No editing, all real, all us.

We have also adapted our process by changing the way we do proposals, client and partner calls, even down to our billing, which we will write about on our new playbook releasing on the Mossio site really soon.

So why did you write this post?

We are big believers in learning from mistakes, and we have made plenty of them. We also firmly believe in never masking those mistakes because masking them makes you more vulnerable to those same mistakes later down the road. So we are open with the mistakes we’ve made, in hopes that we never make them again…but also to help a friend or two down the road.

We’re proud of our new brand, our new look and the vibe of our new site. We hope you are just as excited about, and maybe learned a thing or two in this post that you can carry back to your brand as well.

Follow us on social @mossiodotco