If you’re reading this on our blog, you’re looking at our brand new(ish) website, lovingly designed and built in house by our marketing and UX teams. Featuring our refreshed logo, new font, beautiful visual style and fresh colour palette.
If you’ve followed our journey for a while, you’ll know it’s been a long time coming. In fact, I don’t think we’ve updated our website since we launched almost 9 years ago.
So why now? Well, it was much needed. The previous website didn’t really sum up who we were and what we do as a business. Who’s going to believe you can build cool (and brilliant) stuff, when you’ve got a fairly non-descript WordPress template to show you off?
Head of Marketing, Sarah, reflects on what we learned from the process…
Brand first, design second.
We couldn’t start any redesign work without fully getting under the skin of our brand – who we are, what we stand for and how that comes to life for our team and our client teams.
We kicked off with a brand discovery session with key members of the team, where we unpicked what truly makes us who we are as a business. What we do differently, how we behave with those around us, and what we stand for. We also did some 1 on 1 interviews with people across the business, to get their personal experience and feeling of who we are as a company.
This gave us a firm foundation of who we are, what we stand for, and what needed the visual representation of the brand to be. It also enabled us to create our brand tone of voice, which was key as we had A LOT of website copy to rewrite and update!
Know your stakeholders – and be clear about expectations.
With an internal branding, design and build project, you’re not just creating something for a few key client stakeholders. You’re designing it for your whole business. All your teams, in many countries, and believe me, EVERYONE has an opinion – visual design is super subjective after all.
We realised early on that needed to be clear on who our internal stakeholders were, and how often they would be updated, and the feedback points and process. We then brought in wider feedback at later points, and made it clear what was up for debate, and which areas were non-negotiable. If it were a free-for-all on feedback, we’d never have had a signed off project…!
A good brief goes a long way.
It’s amazing how even the most seasoned project manager / marketer / creative can forget the importance of a good brief when you’re designing for yourself, not for external clients. Luckily, we nailed this one pretty early on. The most important thing, we discovered, was being open and honest about expectations and needing more input in certain areas, to achieve what we needed to.
Treat it like a client project.
Bi-weekly stand-ups, a dedicated Jira board, critical path, time tracking, timelines – why reinvent the wheel just because it’s an internal project? Using the same tools that we use with clients made the process fairly seamless. Except…
Clients come first.
The clichés exist for a reason. Consultancies and agencies, or any service-focused businesses, famously talk about being too busy doing client work to do their own. And it’s true. Deadlines were pushed when client work came in, making the process much longer than we’d anticipated. This isn’t a bad thing; our clients will always come first, and we’ll always prioritise delivering to agreed timelines for that work. Simple as.
Sweat the small stuff
The new logo, font, website – that’s the sexy stuff.
Rebranding all our scope of works, contracts, presentations, client docs? That’s what I’d lovingly refer to as the dregs of the branding project.
When the big bits are out of the way, you’ll realise there are hundreds of other places to rebrand. It’s just part of the parcel. We rebranded the most important client-facing and internal pieces and created easy-to-use templates for other key documents. Everything else? Make a massive spreadsheet with a list of docs and links, bring a trusted team on board, turn your Slack notifications off, and work through them one by one. It’s not hard, but it’s time-consuming – and the sense of satisfaction when you mark the last one as done is immense.
Final thoughts…
Launching our new branding and website was a huge project, and we’re really proud of what we’ve created. We put a lot of care into how we told our story, from the words we chose to the font we used. The most important thing, though, is that the new look is a clearer expression of who we are.
The tech consultancy that believes in behaving differently. Building trust through partnership, not just process, and delivering results with integrity.
What are your experiences of launching a new brand or website? We’d love to hear.
