The Bird’s Got a New Set of Feathers // Little Bird’s Brand Story
With a couple of years under our wings and a need for a fresh look and an attitude adjustment, the Little Bird team decided to reimagine our brand and redefine our culture.
A brand should be something that defines a company’s values, style, and personality. A solid brand gives people an opportunity to get to know you before they even meet you. Visually, a brand should be memorable, unique, and bold. The challenge is how you convey all that in some kind of simple way.
We began by defining characteristics of the company as a team. We came up with a list of values that we feel strongly about. Out of that list we prioritized 3 key traits that are essential to the Little Bird brand; brave, forward-looking, and thoughtful. We also needed to think about how the brand works with our projects. Many times, each project gets an individual style or aligns with the branding of our partners. Out brand needs to be a stage, rather than the main act. So simplicity and malleability were also key design principles we had to follow.
Now that we had some kind of direction, we were able to look at the visual interpretation of the brand and assess whether it lined up with our newly established traits. The yellow and brown colors didn’t feel bold, the script type felt thoughtful, but not forward-looking, and the way that the brand worked across platforms did not seem to be thoughtful. So our challenge became: aligning a new brand around being bold and modern, but also look to the future and show off our passion for people.
We knew a little bit about the direction we were headed. Blue was a color that we’ve always been drawn towards, but we had to find a blue that was warm and inviting. The new color scheme for the brand ended up being this friendly, Little Bird blue with a palette of grays and a teeny tiny bit of red-orange to set some contrast.
We didn’t change the logo because we felt it was a strong, recognizable mark that people are just now beginning to get familiar with.
The heavy use of icons and flourishes has become a more sophisticated version of itself. Some icons haven’t changed and we’ve added some with the hopes of being able to communicate our processes in an easy, visual way. The simplicity of the icons helps boost the Little Bird brand past just a mark, they interpret the mark in a way that exudes our personality and style across platforms and touchpoints.
The typeface, however, did change. We chose to go with Gotham because it is like the warm, friendly brother of Helvetica. It’s rounded shapes and tall x-heights felt down-to-earth and had the ability to be edgy and bold.
Now that we had some “new feathers” we could look across all our touchpoints and recreate them in a new light. Starting with the documentation of our process, to new business cards, and ending with the redesign of our website. Here’s a look at what we look like today:
To find out more about Little Bird visit our website.
