Shaping Our New Brand Direction
Evolution is important. That’s why we need to keep evolving. And with that in mind, let’s discuss how we’re evolving our brand style.
It’s been over 2 years since our brand here at Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) had an overhaul by the creative agency Ueno, and to date, we still feel the project, as a whole, has been a huge success. It brought Shortcut up a level. It made us feel like a grown-up, with responsibilities. It made us feel important. It gave us an identity. But, like everything in life, things grow older, and things change, but that’s a good thing. That’s why evolution is so important. Although we felt the branding project suited us at the time, we began to feel it didn’t reflect who we are as a company now.
But ‘Why?’ I hear you shout. ‘Why does it not reflect who you are as a company now?’ Well, let me break down the rationale as to why we felt it was time to move forward.
If you look at our brand values, you can see pretty easily where the divide begins. They explain who we are, and what we believe in. Straight away you can see a disjointed approach:
On top of our brand values, we have our Brand Essence. This is the linchpin, the blood that runs through our personality:
We are Joyful 🎉: With our product, we strive to make both our customers’ processes and work more enjoyable. Our designs, our illustrations, and our words should reflect the joy behind that goal.
So , obviously, it was critical that our brand assets aligned to our brand values. Looking at them again there was a mismatch. Our colors are bright, really really bright. They were not simple, they were not focused, they were too distracting. Our illustrations were far too generic. They weren’t really that helpful, they were pretty bland and didn’t offer much value.
Another area I’ll dig into that we identified as something that has been missing all along, and it’s an area that a lot of brand identities tend to gloss over. It’s around creating a solid visual hook. A metaphor that ties everything together. I’ll get into that in a bit, but for now, let’s focus the core elements we wanted to change, why we wanted a refresh and how we went about changing them.
Our Color Palette 🎨
So, let’s have a look at the colors. As mentioned, our color palette was something that was really important to our visual identity. The chosen palette was powerful, too powerful. The main primary color was a really bright purple, or blurple as Ueno named it. The identity hinged on blurple. We had other bright colors too, a bright red, a bright orange, a bright green. The problem was, all the colors were so bright, they constantly fought against each other.
We decided it was time for a reset. The thing about choosing a color palette is, it’s just so damn subjective. Like anything in design, some will love it, some will hate it. We needed something that was simple, friendly, joyful, and more importantly, functional. Something that we could use comfortably and consistently.
We set out doing some competitor analysis, to see how other SaaS companies applied their colors. Again, it’s all well and good picking a set of colors. What is important is how they’re applied. How much weight each color gets and how the balance of the colors work together.
We felt a sensible direction would be to choose a set of colors that were somewhat approachable. We also wanted to try keep our purple, so we changed our ‘blurple’ to a ‘durple’ (or dark purple). Then a green, a red, a blue, a yellow. Nothing too hostile. Something that was friendly.
The next part of the process was tedious. A lot of finger in the air choosing of colors, ‘this, this, this, maybe this, 🤷♂️ lets just suck it and see’. We then created a small abstract illustration that would help us apply colors to it to see how they all felt together.
We chipped away, over and over, whittling down, until we got somewhere that we felt was pretty legit. When we had a pretty good idea of a palette we felt might work, it was time to apply the colors to some real world assets. So again, a collection of concept assets were created to try things out. Social assets, illustrations, iconography. Just random designs that we thought would help us figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Actually, I’ll share the link of the Figma file, it will give you a better idea of the process, here you go.
Anyway, long story short, eventually, after a lot of minor tweaking, addressing accessibility issues, ensuring colors worked in harmony, we got to a stage where we signed off our color palette. A refreshing array of pretty colors. The plan being to heavily lean on the opacities of each color to apply a light, smooth, fluffy approach. Delicate yet fun and appealing.
Our Illustration Style 👨🎨
Next up was illustrations, well this part actually happened alongside the colors revamp. Mainly because we felt it was important to be able to try apply the colors to the illustrations, it was key that they felt like they were developed hand in hand.
The plan was to find a style that suited us, something that was unique. Again, the aim was to have something that aligned to our brand values. It had to be fun.
I tried out multiple styles to begin with. Some worked, some didn’t. You can see the some examples of different directions here:
To be honest, looking back at these now, some of these were decent, but I think the blocker was the color palette. We hadn’t really nailed down a new palette so some were still using the blurple which ruined the balance.
We chipped away on the styles, over and over, until we got somewhere that we felt was moving in the right direction. A more sketchy style seemed to fit our brand, it added the right personality, it felt more ‘hands-on’.
Once we agreed that a sketchy style was the best approach, there was a lot of back and forth working on stroke usage, stoke color, stroke weight, shading, to get to a stage where we felt things felt right. We were making good progress at this stage with our color palette so it allowed us to make some more definite decisions. I’ll try break down the overall style approach that we settled on:
- Strokes: use the primary color only (The Peppa Pig method)
- Fills: use opacities only, so no element is usually too glaringly overpowering
- Shading: uses a lined effect to show depth.
- Overall Style: each concept is drawn properly, nothing is skewed or ‘wonky’.
- Overall Concept: each concept is pretty light hearted and fun, try not do anything too generic.
Our Mascot Redesign 🥳
I’ll touch on this project as it’s important to the bigger picture. Originally, Ueno developed Dot, our little purple character. It was to be used to add some fun and joy, but the problem was we had no real idea of how to use it. It popped up in random places, for no real reason, then vanished. As this rebranding project started gathering some weight, it became apparent that Dot needed to evolve too.
A whole backstory was created for Dot and its new set of friends. A whimsical tale of a gang of shapes who lived together in harmony in a magical shape filled world. Except for Stomper, that square is a jerk…
Our Visual Hook 🎣
This is when things took a twist. So, usually for me these projects are relatively straight forward. You create a new color palette, a new illustration style, then apply it to the marketing website and whammo, that’s it. But this is the part where I feel I have learned the most from this project.
The project always felt like it was missing something. Yea, we had a cool new color palette, a cool new illustration style. But the big question that niggled in the back of my mind was ‘What exactly are the illustrations going to be, what’s the catch, how does it all sync up with the product?’
We needed a story. A memorable, unique story. Something that aligned with our values, used our new brand style and most importantly made sense when sitting alongside our content. We thought about Project Management, ‘What does our product do. It brings people on a journey of product development. We could do characters going on a journey, venturing through forests, climbing huge mountains?’ Nah, too obvious…’Well, we help people build products. We could do a construction theme, we could have little minion builders hanging out of big monitors and cards?’ Nah, it’s been done before…
So we started thinking about Dot, and the gang. The shapes. Tetris. How, if all shapes work together they build structures. What if each shape symbolized a task within your project. Not all projects are perfect, but if you’re careful, and have an amazing project management tool to help you, you’ll create some amazing, beautiful structures. So we started to explore shapes, sitting on top of shapes, gently balancing.
Interesting… and then maybe to add a little more joy, what if the shapes were alive, subtly watching you…
For such a random, quirky concept, it all just seemed to make sense. Things all seemed to just fall into place. The colors, the illustration style, Dot and the gang, all working towards this higher concept. It felt scalable. In its most basic terms, you have the shapes, all working alongside each other to build structures, They’re the spine of our illustration style across our marketing site. Then as you dig deeper into the brand, you start spotting Dot and the gang, more defined characters, with their own personalities, being used for social assets, for marketing collateral, blog illustrations, for swag. We’ve already kicked off cool swag from shapes stickers, to a coloring books. Dot stress balls, cool colorful socks full of shapes with shifty eyes. The possibilities are endless.
At last we have a solid visual hook that we can stand by and really push. A visual identity that can become our personality, something we can own. Already we’re seeing the advantages of the visual hook. We can’t wait to really push it and see how far we can take it.
And thats a wrap✌️
A little dive into our new brand approach. Obviously this is just the start of things. We’ve a huge evolving project in front of us but we can’t wait. We firmly believe in this new direction. I hope you do to. If you have any questions regarding any of the above, feel free to shout out.
To see the rebrand in action, visit shortcut.com. Alternatively, feel free to give me a shout to pick my brain (or whats left of it) over at:
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