A closer look at our shiny new brand

You may have heard the phrase ‘cobblers shoes’—this was definitely the case for us. We had been head down, full steam ahead on client work and had somewhat neglected our own brand and website.

But we realised this was affecting how we were being viewed by potential clients.

When you’ve been going for as long as we have, you’ll find your logo in loads of places. From the usual LinkedIn, Instagram etc. to Jira Helpdesk, Google, Email footers, Xero invoices and so on. Across all the touchpoints, multiple variations of our logo were being used.

So we decided to treat ourselves like a client and get going on a full audit of where we were.

Sam joined Si digital recently, bringing with him a fresh perspective on the agency’s brand. This sparked a wider conversation about rebranding the agency. Sam’s experience with brand design put him in the perfect position to look at our brand objectively and without any prior knowledge or prejudice.

So, Sam got to work rebranding us.

The first step we took was to look at our positioning. This was an important part of the branding process as it allowed us to pick apart our values, define the agency’s personality and work out how we want to communicate as a brand.

Our brand proposition—We create digital chemistry—was the first part we settled on. This has actually been our proposition for years, but we know it’s catchy and it works well at reflecting our innovative, creative nature. It also gets across the chemistry we have with our clients. It plays well into our wider brand too.

When we explored our values and personality, things got a little more exciting. We defined our brand archetype, The Creator, which informed our new brand values.

Our values run through into our personality. We’re confident, authentic and ambitious, always looking to improve and grow. We’re not arrogant or over-confident. And we’re sitting on a strong foundation of over two decades of expertise, making us a great choice for our clients.

This all gave us a good starting point to begin some design work.

A brand is never created from one idea, so we pulled together three unique conceptual routes. Each route played into our newly established brand position, but in a different way. 

Route One – Something Familiar

Our first route took our existing identity and tidied it up, bringing sense to the brand. We kept our iconic beaker but broke it out of the hexagon and paired it with a new typeface—Mori. This was a natural progression for the brand, and maintained a level of familiarity.

Beyond the new logo, we kept our punchy pink brand colour, but introduced a neon green and a graphite grey to give us a bigger palette to work with. We selected some contemporary typefaces and developed some ‘liquid gradients’ that played into the liquid in the beaker of our logo.

All of this was capped off with a unique type-style, called ‘Progressive Type’—repeated headline words that are sliced in half horizontally. This was a way of highlighting key words and phrases in a visually engaging way, allowing us to create high impact type-led designs.

Route Two – Something Different

The second route took a totally new approach to our brand. As a creative and innovative brand, we aimed to get this across through an expressive and imaginative look and feel. We gave our beaker a little tilt, giving it a more energetic look and sat it next to a new typeface, PP Right Grotesk (check out those ink traps).

We blew up our brand palette, introducing six new colours to the mix on top of our original pink. The palette was designed to let us flex our creativity and use colour pairings to convey our experimental and creative side. Some bold new typefaces were introduced too. Designed to allow us to really shout about what we do, the headline typeface could be used big, bold and cropped, really allowing the brand to lead with type.

We introduced a set of doodles that we could use to further emphasise our text and layouts. Designed to integrate and play with type, the doodle would loop and overlap words to give designs depth as well as drawing the eye to key words.

Route Three – Something Daring

We really pushed the boundaries here. Leaning into our passion for experimentation, this route pushed our brand into a completely new area.

Our beaker remained, but in an inverted form, creating a clear difference between our old logo and our new logo. This was shifted to the right and floated upwards, allowing the eye to naturally move across the logo. We sat this alongside GT Flexa—an edgy, tech-centric typeface.

We introduced a set of textural images that could be pulled through headlines. Based on macro photography of bubbles, the petrol-like texture worked well to represent the liquid in the beaker, and gave us an eye-catching graphic device we could pair with our typefaces. The brand also used ‘bubbles’ that slot into text lockups to provide structure and a more detailed look at the textural images.

Once we’d finished up creating our concepts, we began refining. This stage essentially brought us to our finalised brand identity. Route one was the direction to go, with a few bits carried across from routes two and three.

We landed in a great place with it all, so let’s take a closer look at what gets us excited about our new brand.

Our beaker has become an iconic part of the agency over the last two decades, and our new inverted beaker brings with it a familiar but fresh look. Moving the beaker out of the hexagon gave us the power to use the beaker more freely as well, so we can capitalise on space when it comes to social media avatars and small space applications.

Our beaker balances perfectly against our new logotype. Designed using a custom cut of PP Right Grotesk, our new logo is fresh and bold, but still feels very Si digital. The structure and type give us the opportunity to go big and bold, too—just check out our footer 👀

Our brand pink has become a recognisable part of our identity over the years, and it’s something we wanted to keep as part of our new look. But we didn’t want to limit ourselves to pink, so we’ve introduced a new neon green and graphite grey to sit alongside our vibrant pink.

We’re still leading with the pink as our primary colour but you’ll be seeing a lot more of our neon green. It’s a statement colour, and we’ll be using it as an accent colour to bring a bit more vibrancy to the brand. Both these colours are balanced against our new graphite grey along with black and white too.

We’re now a type-led brand thanks to our beautiful new typefaces. Our lead typeface is the same as our logotype—PP Right Grotesk. It’s a really flexible typeface with over 130 different weights and structures, but we’ll be using the Wide family. Designed by Pangram Pangram, PP Right Grotesk works really well at larger scales, which helps to highlight its unique ink traps.

Alongside our lead typeface are two typefaces, Aeonik and Aeonik Fono.

Aeonik Fono is a mono-esque typeface, and reflects the software we use to code our websites and apps. It’s got a techy look about it, and works well for larger body copy. We use Aeonik for everything else.

It can be difficult to visualise the services we offer. A lot of our services are within a similar field, so trying to differentiate between these can be tricky. So, we created a bespoke set of icons. Each icon is designed to abstractly represent its service. From UI & UX Design through to Middleware Development, our icons are unique, clean, and a little playful.

We've animated each icon too, giving it a bit of movement. Whether it's a little rotation of one of the elements, or a line growing and shrinking, these movements are designed to give each icon its own personality.

All of this came together on our snazzy new website. From our bold new typefaces to our vibrant new colour palette, our new look really comes to life online. There’s some quirky new features too, like our vertical inverting breadcrumb.

We’ve also introduced ‘mini case studies’. These sit alongside our larger case studies and allow us to show off some of our more technical work in a succinct way. You’ll find these dotted around the site in relevant places.

Our new Behind the Scenes (BTS) social feed gives you a glimpse into what goes on day-to-day in—and out of—the studio. From summer parties to LAN parties, you’ll find it all in here.

We’re really happy with our new look, especially how it’s all come together on our new website. Our new brand not only showcases us as an agency, but it also reflects how we want to move forward into the future. Our innovation and creativity are pushing us forward so we can bring you creative and well designed digital solutions.

If you’ve got a project in mind, or just want to have a chat, get in touch.