New York City
A brand refresh of our own.
The Brief
When Brand Bureau was first born out of the AvroKO studio, it was created to work specifically with a certain project typology. 5 years, 4 offices, and 45 people later, we are not the same studio as when we started in the back room of 224 Centre Street. We’ve grown from a small, scrappy team of ambitious designers and strategists to a full-fledged multidisciplinary agency (and yes, still scrappy). As our services have expanded and our processes refined, we’ve truly evolved as a studio. With that evolution, we needed a new visual identity that was more modern, more flexible, and ultimately a more accurate reflection of who we are as a studio today.
The Challenge
The hardest design projects are always your own. Not only were we dealing with ourselves as clients, and putting ourselves through our own aesthetic rigor, we had two specific parameters to consider. First, the task at hand was evolution, not revolution – how could we reframe the visual language to be more modern and fresh, without straying too far away from what we already had? And secondly, there was the branding paradox – being in the business of building and transforming other brands, how could we inject personality and POV into our own identity, but with enough space to let our clients’ brands shine?
We love the strong, confident tone it carries, while the ever-so-slightly uneven curves and angles in the letterforms add a touch of fun and whimsy.
THE SOLUTION
We knew we wanted a logotype and typography system that was a little more bold than what we currently had, and that it needed to strike the right balance between approachable and sophisticated.
For our logotype, we used National Condensed as our base, layered with a few subtle, custom twists of our own. We love the strong, confident tone it carries, while the ever-so-slightly uneven curves and angles in the letterforms – specifically the a, e, u, r, and d – add a touch of fun and whimsy. For our primary headlines, we turned to Tiempos for its elegant serifs, while the san-serif Moderat for the body copy feels cool and clean. The combination of the two lends a modern, editorial feel to our typography and layouts.
With our original color palette of navy and coral as our foundation, we loved the classic sophistication of the navy paired with pops of coral, but we knew we needed to expand the palette to add flexibility and visual interest. The addition of light grey and putty, as well as a fresher, cyan-like blue, rounds out the system.
