There are hard launches, where everything new goes live publicly – think “New Coke” – and there are soft launches, where the new stuff goes live but without fanfare, to allow for fixing mistakes before everyone is looking. Our new branding is having what might be called a squishy launch: most of it went live yesterday, but the new website is still in the shop and we keep finding little things that we have to do. This is why bigger organizations have someone dedicated to making sure everything is complete before launch. We’re basically too focused on engineering to do that, which is where working with professionals – the good people at Rationale – comes in handy.
Our old branding was created by a large company that does bulk graphic design for small companies, in late 2006, and went live on January 1, 2007. Sixteen years is a pretty good run, considering. In 2006, it consisted of the logo, letterhead, business cards, and envelopes. Over the years we added address labels, and sketch cards. The way that paper use has died off is quite striking: we moved our office six years ago and have used far less paper letterhead at the new address than we did at the old because delivery of documents by PDF overwhelmed and then completely replaced delivery of paper copies.
Things are more complicated now. The new design includes the logo, letterhead, business cards, envelopes, address labels, sketch cards, our brochure, our website, print ads, LinkedIn profiles, and, most importantly, the content related to the graphic design. Our old website – still up for now, with some minor tweaks to make it a bit closer to the new design – was never really unified with the image of our paper documents. The new one will be.
Our old logo, to me, was a spire of indeterminate type – could be an old skyscraper with a pointy top, could be a church – as seen through a window. (I don’t know if that’s what the designer intended. Maybe I should have asked, in 2006.) Our new one keeps the spire but ditches the confining squares. This removes an unfortunate accidental resemblance to Microsoft’s 2012 rebrand – note that we got there first – but also makes the unique part of the design, the spire, the visual focus. We’re structural engineers, not graphic designers, but that means we’re people who think visually, and so every topic involved in the rebrand has been debated in our office.
And now we continue working, with new documents going out in the new style, and revised versions of old documents – drawing sets, mostly – going out in the old style. Like I said, squishy.
Permalink