The branding process is different for every agency, and at Notepad we’ve spent years developing and refining our tried and tested process. The truth of the matter is that the final outcome is only the tip of the iceberg. Days of discussions, research, collaboration and creation go into each and every one of our projects to make sure we end up at the best possible solution. There’s plenty of great ideas and taglines that don’t quite make the cut, so we thought we’d peel back the curtain and share some of the thought process behind one of our latest rebrands for Graide.
Graide provide AI-powered assessment software for educators and students that offers a revolutionary way to increase the efficiency and quality of feedback. After meeting the team and discussing the task at hand we identified the need to focus on the human-led benefits of the platform as well as highlighting the impressive technology behind the brand.
From these initial discussions, we began to create the strategy behind the brand. This included rewriting the Brand Purpose, Vision and Mission to create new foundations to build the visual identity around. When it comes to the visual identity, we like to explore multiple options in the early stages of our projects. It’s a good opportunity to get into the creative mindset and begin to understand the driving factors behind each route or idea. In this instance the design team created three separates routes, all with their own logos, identities and rationales.
The inspiration for these three logos varied from route to route. From discussions with Graide’s directors we discovered that the brand should focus more on the actual grading process rather than the technology that powered it. With this in mind, we developed options built around something commonly found in the world of education: a tick box. This could be in its most literal form or something more playful such as the G monogram we created for route two. For the final option, we wanted to create an emblem that symbolised the back and forth of the feedback between students and educators. This topped off three distinctive directions, all with very different approaches and executions.
From there we began to explore how these routes can evolve into unique identities; colours and typography are a great place to start for this. Some of these routes explore palettes rooted in the original identity as well as introducing brand new options. Our third route, for example, was inspired by the colours of highlighter pens, another familiar element of the marking process. Typography is a great opportunity to introduce more personality and character to your brand. This can be done not only through the choice of typeface but also through the placement and treatment of the type. We liked the idea of incorporating the highlighter theme into our type styles and looked at alternative ways of doing this across two of the routes. Despite the point of inspiration being the same for both these routes, the executions have taken each in their own direction.
Graide were keen to emphasise the human connections that make their business tick. To do this we suggested creating a mascot that conveyed the student/teacher relationship and acted as a guide throughout the brand communications. We developed a mascot for each route ensuring that each one conveyed a particular humanity in their own way. One suggested option was an animated pencil, another an emoji, and also a pair of shapes that resembled a student and their mentor. By pairing these mascot characters with a suite of curated imagery, the human element of the brand was brought to the foreground.
At this point, we had the building blocks for our three different routes. From here it was a case of rolling out these identities across different touchpoints to see how they could flex and adapt to various forms and mediums. After presenting the creative to the team at Graide it was decided that route three felt the most appropriate, and most exciting, for the brand moving forward albeit with a few tweaks. The main priority was resolving the icon within the logo to make it feel more ownable and recognisable. We did this by reflecting on the idea of feedback and the communication between students and educators to create a custom monogram constructed of a circular arrow that formed the letter G – the circular emblem representing the feedback loop. By using this device at different scales we could create patterns, hold imagery and even inform entire layouts. You can find the final solution, and the accompanying case study, here.
So there you have it. For every shiny mockup and polished final logo, there’s a heap of discarded work that took a backseat for the greater good of the project. It takes a whole lot of collaboration and hard work to get to that point and sometimes it’s nice to sing the praise of those unsung heroes. Without that winding path, you couldn’t get to the final destination.
