How we did a major brand redesign

The depth that goes behind the word ‘re-brand’ has is a lot to fathom in a single shot. That’s why we took a healthy amount of days to actually get this re-brand out, and here’s how we pulled it off.

Re-branding - every time I hear this word, it evokes a different reaction from me now than what my reaction was two months ago!

If anyone comes up to me and utters the word re-brand, a mix of tension, excitement, jitters, a lot of options to pick from, contradicting statements, re-dos and a twinge of panic all gush through my blood. Apart from that feeling, cut to now post the re-brand, it gives a fresh feel to your brand and there’s this newly born motivation that keeps pushing you to make things better than it was earlier.

The Start

Out of no where, the air was filled with words like branding, new look, one step ahead and so on. I was curious to know what it was and to make my wish come true, our calendars were blocked. We were a team of five to work on branding and curiosity was etched across all our faces. By the end of the meeting we had heard about starting from scratch, reaching one step higher, discussed our vision, why we were re-branding, what our ultimate goal was and a new look. My inner voice was went like so, ‘Yay, we are going to get new logo, new stickers and new colors’. Little did I know that was not all…

A few articles were shared to read about branding. That was the turning point. The seriousness of branding was understood and soon sank into our brains after we finished reading all the articles. To achieve something that huge needs a lot of planning, working and more working.

Let me get around with what re-branding is first.

The basic idea is to give a new look to the entire brand. The complexity lies in, what all the ‘new look’ comprises of,

• Brand identity
• Brand mark
• Color palette

And it doesn’t end here. Internal changes are as follows,

• Anything that goes from you HAS to reflect the new brand.
• Internal changes like the newly adopted Workflows,
• Exclusive reports of how we get work done
• Templates for all the documents with the brand mark and everything.

This is just the tip of the ice berg and if I’m able to formulate a structure, it’s because we have done it. When we started, we were just a team of 5 working on the re-branding. But the entire team came into the picture in a few occurrences. We began by creating a list of tasks that needed to be done, took responsibilities over them and started with the basics. In its particular order, this is what we covered in our branding,

Charming our way

We began by iterating on our brand mark. We didn’t get it the first time, and we didn’t know if that was what we wanted till we saw it. We named the first iteration The Charm and tried variations on it. After many iterations of the Charm, we found the perfect one. Know why it is perfect here.

Palette

Even the day before the launch we were playing around with colors. We wanted the golden rule to apply for our palette as well. We tried to match the colors on different background images, iterated our brand mark with those colors, and played to match it with our logo. We froze our palette exactly a day before the day of launch and it wasn’t easy neither to reject colors nor to add new ones.

Merchandise

The design duo now frantically began designing to fill our merchandise section. To fit our brand mark with the chosen color palette on our products was hectic. Positioning the mark on T-shirts, designing the stickers, deciding on all the other merchandise took quite some time.

Brand Guide

While all the above mentioned took place, our Head of Marketing, Sankriti worked on getting the brand guide into shape. We learned a lot of new things with the re-branding process and we wanted to share it with others as well. The difference between knowing what a brand mark is and what a logo is, was one of the notable knowledge that we acquired. Where to use a brand mark, where to use the logo and what content should go where and how - everything was covered in the brand guide extensively.

Playbook

We wanted to cut down the time that we spent on explaining the process to anyone who approached us. We wanted to save our customers, clients and seekers’time. The Playbook has been contributed by more than one team. It is a collaborative effort of everyone at Skcript. From the working of our team to capturing the process for different techs we have it written from scratch. This playbook is the beginning, middle and end of Skcript.

Moving a step ahead

Change cannot be implemented if it doesn’t start within, first.

Making changes in our culture, process and tweaks to the way we work was not easy. Each and every step we follow for internal deliverables and all the customer deliverables was modified. This modification was intended to benefit the customer and make everything oriented in steady stages. Contribution to communities such as writing blogs, sharing open source resources, collaborating on events, how to deliver code, stages of testing, marketing handbook, integrating code, and customer regarding process like Communication, resource sharing, answers to how we handle all the techs, the process we follow for AI, Mobile, Design, Front-end, Backend, Marketing and Management, everything had an extensive study before fixing the previous process.

This only covers the documented work. All the non-documented work like the n number of meetings we had to see how and where we stand, all the uncountable iterations, checking and re-checking all the materials, getting the keynote presentation ready, printing visiting cards, ID cards, posters with the new brand mark and color palette took us days and a lot of decision making.

With that said our brand guide, playbook and all the other mentioned docs are available for the public to see what we do and how we do it.

Up next