How we rebranded in 24 hours

Our first logo

UpHill is making health training and clinical analysis software since 2016 and it has been presenting itself to clients, investors, collaborators with this logo:

I know, the Christmas tree resemblance is merely a fruit of your imagination…

Our first brand was made in-house by me (founding team has diverse interests apart from Medicine) at a time when we had no product launched, no maket-fit and no money to spend on branding — our CAC has been 0€ for most of our journey.

As such, the brand was designed to represent a company and not a product, optimized for physical and not digital supports and fitted for a broader audience than our current target sector, e.g. hospitals.

Nonetheless, as we’re fans of good symbology, we nurtured a collective abomination of the tedious triad of health symbols: the cross, EKG and stethoscope. So we went disruptive and our first logo depicted:

  • an upward arrow — meaning continuous improvement;
  • a mountain — representing the challenges posed to/by knowledge and learning in healthcare.

We picked red because it was bold, it stands out and it was sometimes used in health settings (ER, Red Cross, etc).

Small but effective tweaks

As we got more clients and our product suite began to expand, “Chrismas tree” started to counterpoise our reputation and contrast with our clients brands.

So, as with anything UpHill, we made small-effort-high-impact changes. Put it simply, we changed a color to a more traditional schema.

But we knew as a team, that this logo wasn’t flexible enough to support our future ambitions.

Make big changes with fast decisions

If you want to do something the “lean way” the best is to put few people in a room, give them the few money and few time.

At UpHill we hold an initiative we call Quarter Hacks.These are quarterly, 24-hour long, events were we all leave the office to go to a nice AirBnB around town and work on something we like.

There are only three prerequisites:

  • We work in pairs;
  • Deliverable must be completely funcional by t+24h;
  • It cannot be something roadmapped.

By the end of it, we have a brunch and vote on the best project. The winning gets several Amazon Credits.

So…

Our Lead Product Designer (Marta Pires) and I got together and we felt it was the right time to give UpHill branding a new take.

The rebranding sprint structure

Lets review the schedule:

10:00 am

  1. Draft an ASANA project with the steps and deliverables
  2. Agree on timeline
  3. Agree on symbology
  4. Review stakeholders and personas

3:00 pm.

5. Review brands we like and dislike

6. Several sketches drafts from each team member

7. Review sketches and pick winners

8. Improve winners with more derivatives

8:00 pm

9. Pick base logo

10. Review with team (António figured it look like a pizza slice)

11. Adjust

Pizza slice on the left. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

00:00

12. EAT, DRINK & CHILL

13. Color studies and font studies

14. Product logos

15. “New” applications (paper, biz cards, etc)

16. “Replace” applications (previous digital uses — simply screen-capture + copy/paste logo)

Inspired by Atlassian, Zendesk and Mixpanel

04:00 am

16. Animations

17. Wrap-up presentation for the team

After Effects skills are easy to get these days

06:00 am

18. Sleep

10.00 am

19. Showcase :)

David presenting his project while we have brunch

Conclusion

Your team knows product, clients, users and values better than anyone else.

In-house rebranding is a great experience to dive deeper into your brand and the concepts that orbit around it, if you have great designers in your team. Most importantly, a focused process doesn’t need to tumble for months and months long.

Like it? It’s not pentagram-like material, but it’s the closer we need as of 2020.

PS: Although a prerequisite, rebranding was not fully delivered as Marta Pires and Marta Velosa did a great job afterwards making adjustments and producing all the assets for the brand guidelines docs.

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