Rebranding After Digital
The self-rebrand is perhaps the most notorious of projects any agency will undertake. In most cases, simply recognising that it’s high time for a rebrand is a process. Even though we spend our days thinking about how users perceive and interact with our clients’ websites, we rarely think twice about how we are perceived by our users…
Challenges
The main issue we struggled with is a familiar one—while we as a team agreed that our old brand no longer accurately represented us, we each had different ideas as to who we were and who we aspired to be.
To address this challenge, we decided that we would need to carry out a full discovery; essentially going about this rebrand like we would any other project. We planned a series of workshops to be carried out and tasks to be completed, in order to eventually arrive at something that was tried, tested, and agreed upon by everyone.
We believe in our process, which is why we ran our internal discovery like we would with any client project.
Focusing on quick wins
When we first started talking about rebranding, much of the conversation focused on our logo. While we quickly realised that we needed to go deeper than just updating the logo, we also knew that this was going to be a long process. During which, we would become increasingly unhappy with our old brand; as its flaws become more and more apparent. As an agile studio, we are used to a fast pace and iterative phases of work, so we decided to tackle the logo refresh first. For us, it turned out to be a quick win, and gave us the much-needed motivation to let go of the old and start moving forward.
Our new logo clearly references its predecessor, but feels fresher and more refined.
A comprehensive strategy
The next thing we addressed as a team was our differing perceptions of who we were as an agency. We ran a series of workshops thinking about our values and mission, what our personality should be, and also carried out a comprehensive SWOT analysis. As with any project we run, we did extensive research on competitors, explored what we liked and disliked about our current brand, and created a series of moodboards.
We used Miro boards extensively to explore what a new brand might look like
One theme which kept cropping up in all of our exercises, was the pride we take in our clients and our relationships with them. Having worked with arts organisations big and small; from Glasgow to Honolulu; as well as having extensive experience in the e-commerce, energy, and hospitality industries; we realised that there was no point in trying to define who we were in isolation, when really our purpose as an agency is to champion our clients. We believe that with each project we take on—no matter the sector—the partnerships we create with our clients during the project and beyond are what makes it special, and we wanted to celebrate this.
This core insight was the lightbulb moment from which we eventually derived our mission, vision, and values.
Our mission is: Wherever you are in the world, we form partnerships that deliver exceptional digital solutions, enabling you to thrive.
Our values are: engage, listen, and challenge.
Our vision is to create lasting partnerships based on how great we make our clients feel and the results we achieve for them.
Exploration and Definition
Almost all of the projects we take on are characterised by iterative phases of thinking broadly and exploring, followed by phases of honing in and defining. Having defined our core message, we thus went and explored what this could mean for our brand more broadly. We came up with a series of principles which put our values, mission, and vision into a bit more context, and also started to explore how we could translate this into something visual. After all, we still needed a new website, updated slide decks, and a new and improved social media presence; among others.
These principles help us put our mission, vision and values into context.
Sticking to our core aim of championing our clients, we created a brand identity which could strike a balance between a strong and consistent visual identity, while also not taking attention away from the work we do for our clients. We overhauled the case studies on our site, ensuring the best use of client assets, and created a suite of mockups to show off our work. Our aim now is to show; not tell, letting the visuals lead and trusting that our reputation is that of our clients.
Some changes were small but had a big impact on how we perceive ourselves and our work—like changing the name of our blog to ‘Insights and Updates’. We also added a strong purple and warm black to balance out our signature pink brand colour, and unified our typefaces across all of our outputs. We decided we wanted to make more use of first person language, aiming for a tone of voice that was approachable, but not cheesy. Finally, we injected our website with a bit more personality with the help of a set of professional photographs from around the office, allowing us to show the people who work at AD.
Having professional photos taken helped us bring our website to life.
One of the most rewarding outcomes of this process was to see the shift in perspective among ourselves. Having a solid set of values gave us a measure of success for us as individuals in our progression, as well as for our projects and the agency as a whole, and we hope that our clients would want to embrace them as well. Additionally, having an online presence we could be proud of and that we felt accurately represented and articulated who we were, was like a weight being lifted. Of course, this motivated us even more to achieve the same for our clients!
An ongoing project
The truth of any internal rebranding project is that it is a long process. It’s always going to be challenging to find time for our own brand, while simultaneously looking after our customers and their brands. And, being our own worst critics means it is impossible to think of this project as ‘completed’. Currently, we have arrived at another ‘definition’ phase—creating strict brand guidelines and a solid writing style guide. These documents will help to ensure the longevity of our brand, and will allow us to maintain consistency as we welcome new clients and team members to After Digital.
Looking back, it is clear that we have come a long way since that first discovery session, and we couldn’t be prouder to be able to show off our new look—so do have a look around! And, if reading this has made you realise that you could do with a rebrand of your own but are unsure where to begin (you know we’ve been there!), feel free to drop us a line and ask us any questions you may have.