Project Overview

The brand identity for ideaLEVER was designed in an era when developing their proprietary SaaS products was the focus. Shifting the company to a more design-centric and eMarketing services agency required an image overhaul starting with the logo. Without taking a complete departure from the original identity design, I was tasked with making the logo more contemporary while making it have a consistent look with their new product logo redesigns for SiteCM and CommerceCM.

Contents

1. Branding
2. Identity Design

Art Direction

Identity Design 

An evolution instead of a complete departure

The old logo had a dated feeling and didn't portray the maturity of the design services offered. I changed the composition, removed the old drop shadow that didn't translate well in print, and used a sans-serif font to clean up the look and simplify. The logo now reduced much cleaner and is more readable on screens. The palette is the same as the old one, however the saturation of the colours has been punched up and now play nicer together when used on darker backgrounds and photos. I kept the yellow in the word idea but changed lever to a more neutral color that wouldn't compete with the accent.

UI Design

Web Design

Being a small agency meant that while this company rebrand was happening, there was no time to waste in the iterative process. Redesigning the website had to happen concurrently with the identity redesign. As I was polishing the logotype, picking colors and typography choices, I was also working on mood boarding for the portfolio website. The company identity would also need to be translated to being the framework for the product websites for SiteCM and CommerceCM to present a more consistent image.

UI Design

Corporate and Portfolio Design 

Taking a mobile first approach was important for the portfolio with almost 33% of traffic coming from mobile devices. You can see how the translation of the design evolved, from using contrasting serif fonts to the base serif evolved as I got farther through the process.

Identity Design

Continuity & Consistency 

The next step was to translate the company rebrands look and feel into it's products. At the time, each of the CMS logos has a complete opposite brand, which didn't make sense because they often existed in eachother space. Most customers were using SiteCM and CommerceCM within their same website builds, so having 2 competing brands no longer made sense. Trying to continue the idea of making the logos an evolution was important. Some people loved the SiteCM wedge, but it was incredibly hard to apply to anything. So I tried to mould the 2 shapes together. The result is the CM being wrapped with a simplified rounded square reminiscent of a page icon. After all, using a CMS is all about empowering anyone to be able to manage web pages.

Credits

Art Direction: Lea Gucciardi | UI & UX Design: Lea Gucciardi | Application Front-End Development: Lea Gucciardi | Web Design: Lea Gucciardi