Rebranding A Design Agency
Anyone who is a creative professional in any capacity knows that the hardest thing in this world is to produce work for oneself. Multiply this with 50 and that’s where we found ourselves in the fall of 2023 — rebranding SimplePlan.
But first, a little history for those in the unknown — SimplePlan was founded in March 2018 and has been delivering award-winning design and branding work ever since. However, like a lot of other agencies, we never got much time to work on our own branding and design assets. By the time 2023 rolled in, after countless hushed comments in agency-related conversations and clear loud complaints from the social media team, we realized something needed to change. And thus began the saga of SimplePlan’s rebrand.
Distilling The Why
All good design processes begin with documenting the brand/business problems they are supposed to solve. We knew there were gaps in our existing branding but we also wanted to clearly outline them so that our rebrand can take care of all the issues.
Through interviews, discussions and questionnaires, we identified 3 core goals our new branding should accomplish:
- Cater to the entirety of our audience segments — potential clients, potential hires, knowledge-seekers
- Account for all brand touchpoints — digital as well as print
- Fully capture the essence of our agency’s values and personality
With this out of the way, we began the rebranding process.
The Brand Strategy
The first order of business for us was to formulate a brand strategy that could become the North Star for all our future decisions. The strategy covered areas like the agency’s vision, mission, values, and most importantly a clear picture of our target audience. Over the years, we realized that the audience that interacts with our brand the most as well as the audience we care the most about can be divided into 3 neat cohorts:
Clients — the brands, startups, and entrepreneurs we want to work with.
Hires—this is the talent we want to add in our teams.
Knowledge Seekers—these are young designers/creatives who we can share our learnings with.
Once we were clear on who we want to focus on, it became easier for us to craft our vision and mission statements that put our thoughts and objectives into words.
Next, we worked towards finding a single red thread that can tie all these aspects into a single statement—something that encapsulates everything we want to do, be, and work towards.
After much deliberation, the Big Idea we settled on was: “All It Takes Is A SimplePlan”
Not only does it neatly contain the agency name, it also spells out the message that whether you’re a brand looking for great design work, or a talented creative looking for an exciting team, or a young designer wanting to learn the ropes of the industry, all you need is a simple plan.
With the strategy in place, we could now move into the art direction phase.
Brand Art Direction
The first step here was to decide on the very basics of the brand — the colors and the typography.
We loved our original color scheme of red, black and white. With the rebrand, we decided to stick to the color scheme but make the red richer and more vibrant.
For the typography, we moved away from the generic everyday sans-serif (Poppins) to a combination of an Editorial sans-serif (Aspekta) and an italicised Serif (PP Editorial New). The new typography neatly embodies the agency’s approach of adaptability without compromising on the quality and finesse of the work it produces.
Moving forward, we crafted a brand board that could encapsulate the rebrand’s vibe and be the source of all other brand assets.
Brand Identity & Assets
With the art direction for agency’s look cemented in, we began working on the various brand assets across several touchpoints. The primary asset here was our logo.
Similar to the color scheme, we didn’t want to move completely away from our existing logo so we focused on finessing it, aiming to align it more closely with our new strategy.
We refined the existing shape so that it flows better, smoothened out the edges, and gave it an overall sleeker look.
The Website
As a digital design agency, our website is one of the most important brand touchpoints for us. It significantly affects how the clients we onboard and the talent we hire perceive us as a design agency for their brand and career respectively.
Our existing site was made in a couple of hours, 5 years ago, over a dozen cups of coffee and 6 slices of pizza. This is not to say that it was not well-liked—it was different than other agency websites and its novelty papered over its other inadequacies.
Similar to other assets, we wanted our website to be an extension of our brand strategy and for it to cater to all our cohorts. We modelled several different flows that were designed to achieve user-specific navigation and information discovery on the website. Before the models however, we first mapped out areas on the site each cohort will be more interested in. We then used this mapping to validate our flows.
Out of the many flows we modelled, we ultimately ended up going with a simpler one that eschewed hyper-curation and instead leaned towards a simpler yet enriching information discovery for each cohort.
With the flows finalized, we wrapped up the wireframes for the site and moved to the visual (UI) design for the website.
Inspired by the identity system we had created earlier, we molded it for the best on-site experience for our user cohorts. We also simplified the motion guidelines so that nowhere on the site does the motion lead to increased cognitive load.
After a few rounds of iterations, we reached a point where we were happy with how interesting the site looked and how well it performed for our cohorts—the perfect balance between aesthetics and usability.
Lessons We Learned
We design awesome websites for a living and therefore a lot of what we did during our rebrand wasn’t new for us. However, we were very mindful of not falling into the trap of “skipping steps because we do this every day” and while doing so we learned and re-learned a lot of helpful tips.
- A clear user mapping really helps. When you know who you want to cater to and how their experience with your brand should be, it provides your team with immense clarity of vision.
- Don’t just make things because it’s interesting for your designer friends. As designers, we often forget that most things we work on aren’t exclusively used by other designers. When our audience is people who are not exposed to tonnes of unique ground-breaking design work, over-designed stuff can really alienate them. In short, design for the audience you want to attract.
- Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. It took us a good part of 2023 to do all of this. Good things take time and when it comes to branding, it makes sense to not make decisions in a hurry because they are going to last a long time. (Our old website that we made in a few hours lasted for 5 long years.)
We wanted to document the journey of our re-brand with all you people as a part of our 2024 resolution to share more of our learnings with the wider design agency and designer community.
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