The studio-wide excitement and anticipation of the official launch of our rebrand have been real. Since October, we’ve been working on developing a revised vision and structure for our growing creative agency. As we began wrapping up our re-polished business plan, it became clear that our visual identity and logo were out of phase with our new direction. At the core of the dissonance was our intention of venturing deeper into branding services.
In 2015, Cecelia and I launched Starry Eyes Media. My goodness, we spent so long on developing our logo. We eventually fell in love with our previous logo; it really grew on us. It was a rocky relationship, though. One of the biggest points of contention was the eyelashes that broke past the right boundary of the main body of the brandmark, it wasn’t offset by a left eyelash (it would have looked weird if it did since the brandmark was an eye that was being seen form an angle/in perspective.
Anyways, that (cantankerous) eyelash made it hard to center the logo. By 2017, we finally came up with a file version that had the main body of the logo centered, with that contentious eyelash actually throwing the overall composition off-center. I personally just couldn’t keep placing that marginless logo file anymore.
It’s the end of an era for us, and that’s obviously somewhat bittersweet once I fully consider the fact, but honestly, the excitement of having a logo that we can break down into a brandmark format (sans wordmark) is refreshing.
Going beyond the logo, our brand refresh also includes a full visual identity update, complete with new colors, fonts, and styles. Additionally, we also took the time to fully define a positioning strategy, complete with a defined philosophy and intention. Honestly, the “warm and fuzzies” that come from really considering “who” your brand should be got me through some long stretches of work. It made the long days worth it.
We’ve always offered branding services, but to now be able to fully appreciate the process of launching a rebrand gives us a unique perspective. It’s not something to be taken lightly, there is a lot of consideration with launching a brand refresh. Being the repeat-offender of malicious list-making, I knew we needed to have a working checklist of digital presence profiles. More than just Facebook, Instagram, Dribbble, and Twitter, there are a ton of other online profiles we had. There’s Google, Bing, Apple, and so many more. There are profile images to update and, for some platforms, there are cover photos. Oh, LinkedIn, YouTube, Slack, Stripe; I just keep remembering more places to have to refresh our profile. My current count is 39 individual websites that we needed to update, not counting our own website (a huge refresh project in and of itself.)
To empower innovators and champions of ideas by crafting compelling brands, strategies, and promotional tools that connect them to their audiences.
Our New Mission Statement
Another exciting part of our rebranding was the development of icons to represent our services and our processes. Our designer Jordan took the lead on creating the initial concepts for our icons. Through a few rounds of revisions, we narrowed down the set of service icons to include representations of our Branding, Website Design, Print Design, Photography, Video Production, and Workshop services, Additionally, we developed “process” icons to represent the stages in our development process. Amongst these were icons for our Onboarding & Discovery, Research & Strategy, Design & Build, and Launch/Delivery phases of production.
We’re anxious to see what everyone thinks about our new branding. Leave us comments below if you have any feedback. If you would like more info on our branding services, check out our branding services page here.
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