Problems With The Old Brand
Our previous brand had two major shortcomings that needed to be addressed. There were other small gripes and complaints about the brand, but those could have been dealt with or ignored. On the other hand, the two big problems mandated we take some form of action.
Problem 1: Producing Print Collateral
The issue involving print collateral stemmed from the font used, Acumin Pro Wide. The logo is set in the ‘Thin’ weight of the font and, while it looks great on screens, when we went to produce our new business cards it was simply too light of a weight to use in print. The text ended up only partially filled, which looked terrible and on was completely illegible on many pieces. We looked into other weights and variants in the Acumin Pro font family, but none looked right to us.
Problem 2: Trademark
The other (and arguably bigger) problem we found was a lack of strong brand identity. We decided that our logo mark, the gold ‘7’, which was slightly modified from the base font, was not strong enough and did not provide a result in a readily identifiable brand.
The New Brand
We’re glad we had to redesign! We love our new brand & identity and will be rolling it out across all areas of the business. We will also be revisiting and updating the Studio7 website to reflect the new brand as time permits, but as that’s a more involved project it will take some time to finish.
Font Selection
We wanted to maintain the look and feel of our old identity, but we wanted something bolder, sturdier, and of course unique. After searching for a font for the better part of a month we stumbled across Glacial Indifference (credit and thanks to Alfredo Marco Pradil and Hanken Design Co. for creating and offering this awesome font!).
Glacial Indifference
First, it looks incredible. It has a strong, bold presence without being heavy, and it has a certain level of geometric precision that’s reminiscent of Bauhaus fonts.
Second, it’s licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which means we’re free to use, embed, and simply do anything we want with the font except sell it. We set both our logotype and logomark in Glacial Indifference.
In order to maintain the strength of the marks when used in media, we opted to source another font for setting written copy. We settled on Effra from Dalton Maag Ltd..
Effra
It’s a great modern font that results in fantastically legible text. It has a geometric feel, but is significantly less rigid than Glacial Indifference and is softened by rounded shapes and humanist details. This lets our mark stand strong and stay front and center while presenting readers with clean and easy-to-read content. Effra also comes in five weights with matching italics, so it allows for significantly more flexibility when designing copy than the mere three variants (standard, bold, italic) of Glacial Indifference.
Colors
We really, really liked our old colors, so we wanted to keep the palette relatively similar. However, we acknowledged a couple shortcomings of our old colors and wanted to take this opportunity to fix those. The most prominent problem was our mark almost needed to be set on a dark background. Otherwise, it was simply too hard to see. While this is an issue with the design of the mark itself, we acknowledge that color selection and the resulting contrast also played a factor. So with that in mind, we set out to build a palette that would look great regardless of background.
We definitely weren’t about to give up our orange (Pantone 1375C for the curious), but we wanted to move away from the royal purples. We eventually settled on a slate blue to contrast the warmth and vibrancy of the orange. It also happens to look stellar as a fill-color on paper.
The Marks
We now have two marks - our logotype and our logomark. Our logotype is set using Glacial Indifference with high tracking. It’s surrounded by a simple right rectangular orange border (no corner radius). In some variants, we incorporate the logomark with the ‘S’ wrapped around the ‘7’ into the logotype.
Our logomark consists of modified versions of Glacial Indifference’s ‘S’ and ‘7’ glyphs. The ‘7’ is set in our orange and the ‘S’ is set in our navy.
###Identity Kit
Once you’ve built your brand identity, it’s important to put together a brand identity kit that will serve as your central resource for information relating to your brand. This is the summary/overview portion of Studio7’s kit.
Our New Business Cards
We’re pretty excited about our first piece of print collateral with our new look, so we wanted to share a mockup of our new cards with you!
We’re ordering these from MOO and chose their Luxe cards in “MOO Size”. Of all easy-to-order business card & print suppliers that are out there, we have found Moo to be the best in terms of quality and customer service. They’re located in England so their turn-around time isn’t the quickest, but the result is well worth the wait. If you’re in the market for some print goods give them a shot! And if you order through our link you’ll save $15 on your first order!
Does your brand need an update?
Every once in a while you’re going to need to update your brand to stay current and to align your image with your business goals. If you’ve been thinking that it might be time for an identity update or brand refresh then contact us for a free assessment and we’ll give you some suggestions and tell you what we can do for you!.
Thanks for reading, and we hope you like our new look as much as we do!
