Arthur Rebrand
Refining a brand to reflect a company’s personality and purpose.
Overview
Arthur is a product strategy and user experience design studio that makes digital products easier to use. We are a group of talented problem solvers and designers with a love of the game, and while we take our work seriously, we didn’t want others to think of us as all work and no play. Our ability to have fun is our secret to great work: our clients will tell you the same.
As the lead designer on this project, I worked with two other designers at Arthur to create a new visual identity for our brand and reimagine our website over the course of six weeks.
ROLE
Lead User Experience Designer
DURATION
Six weeks
RESPONSIBILITIES
Brand Development, Information Architecture, User Interface Design
Problem
At Arthur, we describe ourselves as fun, casual, and direct. While our voice and tone in our previous branding were casual and direct, our brand’s visual representation was more serious than fun. We needed a brand that more accurately reflected who we are as a company and a website that communicates our purpose and personality.
Constraints
Shortly after embarking on our rebranding and redesign efforts, our CEO was booked to speak at a conference in San Diego, which presented an opportunity to unveil our new brand and boost our awareness in the local community. With only a month to re-envision and rebuild our website from the ground up, we had to collaborate frequently and iterate often.
Design Process
To start, the design team set out to gather inspiration for our visual identity while the other members of Arthur reviewed our site’s information architecture and content. After gathering feedback on our exploration, we began to ideate on the Arthur brand using color, type, layout, and imagery. Based on the terms “fun and casual,” I explored organic shapes and vibrant colors, which were in stark contrast to the use of rigid shapes and limited color palette of the previous Arthur brand. For “direct,” I wanted to be somewhat literal with our use of imagery to communicate what we do. In doing so, I abstracted illustrations of a mobile application and wall in a messy but fun way to show the types of mediums we design for: screens and walls. We once again collected feedback and narrowed our explorations to three promising options.
With the revised information architecture and content in place, I created wireframes of the primary pages across breakpoints for desktop, tablet, and phone. Each visual direction was applied to see how they would look in the context of actual content. We reviewed our work with the rest of the time one final time, and I chose the execution that we would move forward with. At this point, we were about a week from our CEO’s presentation, and it was apparent that we would not have sufficient time to finalize the design and build the site in Webflow. To compromise, we updated the site’s copy and layout while retaining the old Arthur brand’s styling. That way, we still would be able to make progress with our site without a half-baked design in place. After the conference, we took an additional two weeks to build out and publish the rebranded site.
Outcome
While the website’s redesign was a step in the right direction, the condensed time frame left something to be desired for our brand’s visual execution. Individually, our use of type, color, layout, and illustrations seemed to hit the mark, but together, our brand didn’t scream “Arthur.” Our next project, redesigning our sales deck, was the perfect opportunity to continue to push the boundaries of who we are.
