We launched the new InfluAds brand back in June and we invited our friends from Studio Tundra to make it happen. This is their account of the process since many people have been praising our design across the web.
Working closely with Anibal, InfluAds CEO we set about our initial challenge of how to go about creating a strong, memorable brand for a business that sells a service, a service that has the word ‘minimal’ embedded firmly in it’s beliefs, a service that offers up little visual reference or tangible imagery.
The Solution
With the desire to solidify the brand we began from scratch, and set about creating a basic graphic identity, and style combined with a new confident tone-of-voice. As for the challenge of clear visual reference we took into consideration that the core of the InfluAds business is built around the idea of ‘crowd sourced’ advertising and chose to focus on the communities of curators that InfluAds work with. Thus we set about creating a graphical universe based on icons. The icons were designed to not only be the driving visual influence, but also a distinct User Interface system.
The Logo-mark
There was a strong desire from InfluAds to move away from a purely typographic logo, as they had had previously, in favor of a logo that had a strong logo mark that could maybe be used on it’s own.
We chose to focus on the ‘Ads’ part of the name and set about creating a stylised A. A few options were entertained using various abstract but memorable A’s, before we settled on an A that is iconic and creates a feeling of togetherness.
The Icons
Very early on when we had decided to focus on the use of icons, we had the idea to create and incorporate an all-encompassing key-visual, that utilized the brand logo mark whilst featuring the collaborative nature of the curator icons. The chosen ‘A’ thus lent itself perfectly to the idea of the key-visual.
The Typography
With the intention for the concept to use dominant typography as part of the visual language, we early on the process opted for a classic condensed headline font. At the concept stage we working with DINSchrift 1451 Engschrift, but as we began implementing the designs we opted for a web-based font, and thus chose Atrament for it’s similar condensed, headline style. We chose Helvetica as a complimentary system font.
The Colour Palette
The use of colour had to be bold but simple, hence we opted for a soft red which is complimented by 4 shades of grey and of course white. In the instance of the website we of colour is such that we have created a UX system of colour coding different areas of the website.
The new brand launched late June and has so far been met with a great response both from a business sense, and feedback regarding the overall design. The brand as we hoped is beginning to solidify InfluAds in it’s competitive market, and through it’s nature can be grown and adapted to future needs.
The InfluAds crew have been very pleased through the way our work happened. It was a very interesting challenge to work on a very marked identity while exploring an UX/UI that would fit our needs, involving a lot of sweat that may be the subject of a new blog post. The outcome is one of the best work we’ve done so far and even if we intent to make some improvements, we know that this identity is very strong and adaptable to our future needs.
