Moving Brands worked with Cloud Experience, a cloud storage service backed by TomorrowVentures (Eric Schmidt’s venture fund) to define their unique business proposition in a saturated market.

Strategy

The team had one key objective; to be a market-leader in the already-crowded cloud storage market. To achieve this, Moving Brands worked with their key stakeholders to define the core product offer, select and understand their audience, and create a striking, differentiated brand identity.

We distilled the many possible product options into one clear focus: The product would be ‘more social’ than any other cloud service. Hero Journeys were developed – a snapshot of the multiple user benefits – that aligned the product offer to a consumer segment.

Identity

In order to differentiate Cloud Experience from their competitors, it was imperative to look at the name. The team felt this was generic and uninspired, drawing parallels with smaller, more commoditized companies. Cloud Experience had already invested heavily in the domain name, so a thorough naming process working within these limitations led to the solution of ‘CX.’ The aspirational and user-focused strap line “Cloud to the Power of X,” suggests an offer that encompasses all you expect from the cloud, magnified to the infinite power.

For this technology-led but consumer-focused organization, a believable, human Brand Narrative was critical. ‘Content comes to life’ reflects CX’s ability to bring simplicity and excitement to the way we share and store content in a moving world. Defining Behaviours such as ‘geektastic,’ ‘simple’ and ‘obsessive,’ gave shape to the character of the business and how the experience they deliver comes to life.

The visual identity system was driven by the important relationship between the copy and graphic language. The vibrant core assets are complemented by a library of color and pattern elements. A bespoke typeface was created that includes a built-in open-type iconographic system. The unique graphic language is supported by a tone of voice and messaging system built of the Brand Behaviour and Brand Character attributes. A system of curated photography completes the system.

The UX underpins the product’s ‘social’ credentials, and was designed to be scalable, with added functionality and user experience to be implemented as the business matured.

Experience

The identity design system was channeled consistently in the UI and UX of the website, and the Web, mobile and iPad apps. Moving image was used as a major feature on the CX website homepage to share the brand story.

Whilst the CX offering is accessed online and via apps, we also created final executions that brought the brand to life in a cross-channel system including print collateral, social media platforms, apparel, and a brand video.

The brand messaging was rolled out across an online campaign, and visualized across an outdoor media campaign, with hero messages including:

• ‘Less Fluff More Cloud’
• ‘You’re gonna love it up here’
• ‘Cloud to the power of X’

“Moving Brands understood exactly what we needed and what we were trying to achieve with our business and our brand. Their knowledge of new technologies along with their talent for design made them the perfect partner. I’m thrilled with the results.”
— KEITH PARDY, CMO, CX INC

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Also from Moving Brands on Identity Designed: Watermark.

View more on brand identity projects on the Moving Brands website. Follow the team on Twitter.

The Green Standard is a new Russian network of high-quality grocery stores offering fresh, pure organic farm products and providing excellent service and consumer comfort combined with attractive prices. The project brief required a modern, organic design that was equally attractive for different age groups.

Developing the project our experts created the original name, logo, brand identity, brand guide, and interior design. The name “The Green Standard” perfectly reflects the main essence of the project as well as the brand positioning in the food retail sector. The name signifies that the brand sets the highest standards for services and quality of pure organic food, following them strictly.

From scratch, the project development took about four months: naming, creation of few concepts for the client, the choice of one of the options, development and approval of the final concept, all taking into account the positioning of the new brand.

It had to be an original, eminent image showing a lively, natural, and outstanding brand. The concept of the visual image underwent several metamorphoses before it assumed its present appearance. Finally, after much debate, the result was achieved thanks to the efforts of the excellent team of seven professionals of BrandExpert “Ostrov Svobody” (The Liberty Island).

The original logo — created using a green apple slice — communicates the highest freshness of organic products. The identity system and interior design feature dominant natural colors and wood tinges to indicate a natural and friendly image of a contemporary organic brand.

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View more identity work on the Ostrov Svobody website.

The Juice Agency is a Toronto-based digital marketing firm which sits at the intersection of strategy, user experience, and technology innovation.

The History

Juice evolved from Communicate New Media, a design and development shop with a seven year history of creating award-winning work for some of Canada’s leading advertising and marketing agencies. As marketing budgets shifted more towards digital initiatives, we often found that the briefs we received were lacking in sound strategy, weren’t grounded in best practices around digital or social executions, and often weren’t asking the right questions or solving real business problems.

In 2011, we made the bold move to rebrand and become a direct-to-client agency, with the belief that we could plan and execute digital marketing better, cheaper and more transparently. Being our own agency would also allow us propose the innovative solutions we often generated; ones that traditional agencies often shied away from.

Naming

While several potential agency names were added to a whiteboard over the course of a few weeks, over time, “Juice” proved to be the one that resonated the most with the founding partners. It references an energy-giving, healthy liquid from a natural source, and colloquially, “juice” can also refer to energy, or electricity.

When the founding partners identified the core values and vision for the agency, much of the language that evolved from those sessions — concepts around honesty, transparency, natural processes, a lack of artificiality, dynamic flow — found their way into our initial brand story. The visual identity we designed would need to communicate this vision and language.

Principles

As a digital agency, we believe in constant evolution and change. We didn’t want a static identity but a dynamic, changing one; a core shape that could serve as container for different layers of meaning. We began by sketching numerous different ideas with the goal of finding a pattern or system that we could apply in various ways. We explored several promising options (a sort of “orthographic juice box” was popular for a time), but we kept returning to the simple, organic droplet shape time and again. It spoke to our brand story better than anything else, and held the potential for a larger identity system.

Typeface

As soon as we had developed a few successful iterations of our identity (the bulb, the pencil), and saw that it would provide a rich and fertile system, we moved toward selecting the typeface. Recognizing that we needed something clean and rigid to lend stability and maturity to the ever-changing, colourful variations of the droplet, DIN became a logical choice with its clean, technical appearance.

However, we eventually altered DIN’s “J ” in order to improve its relationship with the curve of the droplet. This unusual “J” is also a nod to the innovative solutions we strive to bring to business problems.

While we use DIN in most of our communications, we also use Foco Black Italic — a “wanna-be” script font — as a complimentary typeface. In cases where our playful illustrations do not appear, Foco keeps the flavour of our brand intact in ways that DIN alone never would.

Colours

The colourful icon system we developed was never intended to serve as the logo itself. Rather, we developed a clean, simple logo based on a green droplet and wordmark. While we were tempted to use a bright, friendly orange, we recognized that the stereotypical colour of ‘orange juice’ would come to mind far too easily. Since our brand story uses words like “evolution,” “natural” and “seeds” (our process is “Sow, Grow, Flow”), the lively green spoke to our personality quite well. After experimenting to find a complementary colour, the dark blue emerged as something that showed-off the identity well, while providing contrast and legibility.

Implementations

Today, different iterations of the “droplet” appear throughout our blog, alongside copy in sales decks, in our print ads and more, allowing us to tailor our visual message while remaining true to our brand.

Our business cards provide a good example of our flexible, dynamic identity. We have developed a large number of icons so far (some of which can be seen in our animation at the foot of the post), but we chose eight iterations for the cards that best communicated our personality. For example, the “strategic” dart, the “social” bee and the “energetic” hummingbird.

We sometimes present our cards with the icon showing and allow people to choose the one they like best. This experience — that some people interpret as a playful little “personality test” — tends to break the ice. In the process, our card becomes less of a formal necessity and more of a personal keepsake.

Subscribers who can’t see the video above can view it here on Vimeo.

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Visit The Juice Agency website. Follow The Juice Agency on Twitter.

A robust custom typeface designed for airline Blue1′s Premium class is the core visual element of a launch campaign created in cooperation with an advertising agency Lovely Amsterdam. The typeface was created with an old letterpress machine and a set of wooden block letters. After printing, the individual letters were digitised, cleaned, vectorised and modified to make it a full working font family.

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View more brand identity work on the BOND website.

The client

BluePrint Ceramics are specialist suppliers of high quality innovative tiles to both the commercial and domestic markets. Their extensive project portfolio encompasses the leisure, retail and industrial sectors, in addition to high-end residential markets, throughout the UK and overseas. For more info on BluePrint visit www.blueprintceramics.com. Their new site (designed by Avenue) will go live soon.

This project came about as a result of an introduction through a mutual contact, and (in a fairly speedy turnaround) was completed in approximately six weeks. Initially BluePrint brought Avenue on board to design their 2012 brochure. After some careful analysis, it was decided that a wider rebrand was required to bring BluePrint’s public face in line with the quality of products and service they offer.

The logo

BluePrint’s old logo

We advised BluePrint that the existing logo was a little over-complicated, awkward and not particularly versatile. Understandably, there was a desire to maintain some of the existing identity, in particular the colour and an upmarket quality.

We stripped the logo back to its core elements. It was also decided at this point that the ‘BC’ icon should be able to stand alone as well as alongside BluePrint’s (now custom) logotype. The resulting logo is decidedly slicker, more easily applied and certainly meets the client’s aspirations of a classy, luxury image.

The brochure / expansion of the brand

Throughout the process BluePrint were excellent in communicating feedback and supplying us with the content and reference materials we needed. The brochure, or product guide, required a mass of information on BluePrint’s ranges to be laid out in an easily digestible and negotiable manner.

We began by choosing fonts to complement the logo. A classic headline (Bodoni SvtyTwo OS ITC TT) and a more modern, legible typeface (Anivers) combine well to extend the traditional/contemporary BluePrint theming. Natural stone colours were utilised as background with white backed tables atop holding technical information on tile ranges. A toolkit was soon formed to provide consistency and render the navigation of the stock-lists intuitive.

The website

Our next task was to lead the developing brand (created by the brochure and logo) into a new BluePrint website. As with the brochure before it, the website required a sizable amount of information to be broken down into a suitable format for potential customers. The trick was in the placement of the buttons and the design of a user interface for the site’s new ‘Product Selector’. Lifting fonts, colours, brand furniture and background patterns from the brochure made styling the site easy. www.blueprintceramics.com – launching soon.

Stationery & email newsletter

Finally, and in a somewhat backward order, we designed BluePrint’s business stationery. Letterheads, compliment slips and business cards preceded an email newsletter that publicised the release of the company’s 2012 brochure.

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View more identity work on the Avenue Design website. Follow Avenue on Twitter.

Doctor Entertainment is an independent game development studio founded in 2009 by Jesper Rudberg and Anders Pistol, both senior game developers with experience from several multimillion selling AAA games. Their first game, Puzzle Dimension, scored some great reviews and proved that Doctor Entertainment was a developer to count on. In time for the announcement of their second release, they got in touch with us to do a complete rehaul of their company brand, including a new identity, business cards and website.

When we first sat down with Doctor Entertainment we were all pretty keen on trying out a concept that revolved around using a white cross from a directional-pad (from a classic game controller) against a green background, as a symbol for the company. The directional-pad would identify the game studio, and the white/green cross would tie in with the word ‘doctor’, looking like the sign for a pharmacy. The idea was that the d-pad would be the only real indicator of game development, in an otherwise very strict and clinical appearance, which would make the company stick out in an indie-game market where most other companies seem to go for either a dark and sci-fi inspired look, or a very playful, child-like appearance.

However, after having tried this approach something didn’t feel quite right. The Doctors thought it looked too much like a pharmacy, while we weren’t all that excited with the obviousness of the d-pad cross. It just felt too simple. Returning to the drawing board we tried to alter the concept of combining the words ‘doctor’ and ‘entertainment’ into one, and came up with something that instantly felt much better. The white heart on bright-red background connected perfectly with the loving and playful attitude of the company, at the same time as it could easily be seen as the sign hanging outside a young and fresh pharmacy. To add a third layer of meaning, we also made the heart look like it was written with the ascii characters ‘<' and '3', connecting it further to the digital nature of game development.

After having everyone agree upon the concept, we went on finalizing the logo and developing the rest of the identity. Avant Garde was picked as the primary typeface, because of its roundness working well together with the circular symbol, and the final color was chosen to look warm and inviting, edgy and youthful. The business cards got a uv-varnished backside, and the website was purposely designed with large images and typography to work well on the iPad as well as on desktop computers.

More than any other project we’ve worked on, this one really proved the importance of sometimes starting over if you’re not entirely satisfied, rather than trying to force your way forward.

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1910 was featured previously on Identity Designed with the studio’s work for Senri.

View more brand identity work on the 1910 website. Follow 1910 on Twitter and on Facebook.

VM is an architectural practice working on a broad range of domestic and commercial projects with an integrated approach to interiors.

We created a logo that’s simple and elegant. We started from the Didot Italic font, using the capital letters V and M, modifying and combining them to create an structural logo.

The beauty of raw, natural materials and a rigorous attention to detail was the key concept when designing the stationery.

We chose a woodfree paper-felt marked on both sides (Acquarello from Fedrigoni). Everything was printed with silkscreen, except the notebooks that have an embossed logotype.

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View more work on the BOSCO website. Visit the BOSCO blog. Follow BOSCO on Twitter.

After winning a competitive pitch, Channel 4 commissioned ManvsMachine to create a new brand identity and on-air look for More4. The package aligns with a re-focused range of content on the channel.

The re-brand is centred round a bold, flexible logo that morphs through a series of flips, folds and reveals. The colour palette reflects the vibrant nature of interiors, food culture, fashion and other contemporary lifestyle programming.

Live-action idents see the brand break out into the real world in the form of mechanical ‘flippers’. The installations inhabit environments from a domestic staircase to an abandoned fishing boat in Dungeness. To achieve this ManvsMachine teamed-up with installation design pioneers, Jason Bruges Studio, to help design and build a flexible system consisting of over 400 individual flipper units.

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View more work on the ManvsMachine website. Follow ManvsMachine on Twitter.

Founded in 1971, Embraco is a global company, with factories in Brazil (headquarters), Italy, China and Slovakia. World leader in the hermetic compressors for cooling systems, product and development has always been a priority for the company. Despite Embraco’s global market dominance, little attention was paid to its brand, a scenario that intrigued senior management. Consequently, Interbrand was given the challenge of transforming Embraco’s brand into a valuable asset.

The new logo is a visual construction of Embraco’s brand values. It expands the range of colors that represents our company. Inspired by the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, a phenomenon of various colors caused by the contact of solar winds by the Earth’s magnetic field. Some of these colors are now the colors of Embraco.

We went for an all-type, easy to apply logo. Embraco’s primary product is the hermetic compressor for cooling systems. It’s constantly functioning to change the states of matter, what inspired us to create the infinity symbol using the letters “c” and “o”. The tagline has several interpretations to it. “Power in” may refer to the excellence of their product functioning inside the fridge, as well as the strength of their global team. “Change on” is again an allusion for infinity and constant transformation.

The visual universe was inspired by the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis, as a new way of seeing and perceiving the cold. We used thin lines to illustrate the technique and complexity required in Embraco’s field of work.

The icons work to maintain the logo’s consistency and flow. With round shapes, they match Embraco’s typography and graphisms.

The reception area conveys the brand identity concepts, while curved backgrounds promote a sense of physical infinity. Our idea is to provide an inspiring brand experience so visitors can recognize Embraco’s personality as soon as they enter the company.

Embraco’s facade in LED lighting attracts the eyes of everyone who passes by the company’s headquarter in Santa Catarina, Brazil.

The launch took place in 6 countries, simultaneously: Brazil, Italy, China, Slovakia, USA and Mexico.

As a brand management tool, we created Embraco’s brand territory. It puts together strategic, verbal and visual guidelines to inspire the creation of new communication materials.

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View more work on the Interbrand website. Follow Interbrand on Twitter.

Although very popular in Brazil, Mexican food is relatively new within shopping mall food quarters. As such, it was necessary to communicate the new brand and it’s products without falling in the stereotypes of the category: heavy and spicy food.

The new identity was designed to be clean, colourful and fun, and especially made to show the wide diversity of Mexican food and culture in a new easy way. The colours, fonts and graphics were inspired by all inherent icons and aspects of mexican culture such as the lucha libre posters and many others.

The result is a new way to make ethnic food restaurants modern, easy and pleasant to all kinds of consumers without losing their authenticity and expected characteristics.

Here’s how the store-front looked before the rebrand (below).

Chilli Pilli store-front (before)

And after.

Chilli Pilli store-front (after)

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View more work on the KONG REX website.