Today, we launched our new brand identity and website – and we’re so excited to share it with our community and the world. This rebrand is the result of countless hours of work over many months. While we’re generally of the mind that brands ought to speak for themselves, given that our business sits at the intersection of design and education, we thought the community would be particularly interested to get a behind-the-scenes look at how this new brand came to be.
A Long Time Coming
Designlab is a little more than ten years old (founded in 2013), and the previous incarnation of the brand was largely in place from the beginning. “The original logo and fonts were all there from the very start,” recounts Designlab Co-Founder and CEO Harish Venkatesan. “Over the years, the brand evolved a bit organically, but we never really stopped and thought intentionally about updating the brand until more recently.”
The impetus for the rebrand was the natural progression of our product and audience. When Designlab first launched, the business primarily focused on teaching design to non-designers who wanted to round out their skillset – marketers, product managers, and the like. Over time, some of these individuals began stacking multiple Designlab courses together and transitioning into design careers. From these early examples, our flagship program, UX Academy, was born. As time went on, the original cohorts of UX Academy graduates matured in their careers and today many are senior designers, design managers, and leaders of teams.
“Although career-switchers remain a core part of our business,” said Venkatesan, “going forward we see programs and courses for mid-career and senior designers to be an increasingly integral part of our offerings. So given that our audience is one with a maturing set of design sensibilities, we felt it important for our brand to follow suit and feel elevated from a design perspective, while still staying true to its roots.”
Finding an Outside Perspective
Once the team committed to go forward with a full rebrand, we decided to seek the services of a brand agency to help us with the process. While design is undoubtedly in our DNA, as a business we’ve primarily focused on UX and product design – brand design, while adjacent, is largely a different discipline. Further, rebrands aren’t just about visuals. If anything, storytelling is an even more important part of the process, and we thought it best to get an outside perspective on our story by using an external agency. After a thorough vetting process, we settled on Toronto-based agency, Whitman Emorson. We could tell you about them, but we’d prefer to let them tell you about themselves:
Started in New York and based in Toronto, Whitman Emorson is a design studio that solves complex problems with a human touch. Female-founded and led, we’re a team of creative thinkers—designers, strategists and writers—bound by the desire to produce strategic, thoughtful and responsive work. Clients become long-standing partners and collaborators as we strive to understand your organization’s needs and deliver on strategic and creative opportunities.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
The Discovery Phase
Whitman Emorson began their engagement with us by auditing the Designlab brand. This meant looking at instances of how the brand was showing up in various forms and channels – not just from a visual perspective but also in terms of tone of voice, messaging, positioning, and more. From there the agency also did a similar audit of the industry as a whole to understand how Designlab sat among its peers – and begin to understand what a future facing brand could and should look like. “One of the things we found when looking at other players in Designlab’s space,” said Hannah Siklos, Business Director at Whitman Emorson, “was that there weren't a lot of examples of other organizations who were really leading with design. Rather, we found a lot of similarities between various brands in the space, using similar color palettes, imagery… even down to iconography. So it felt like there was an opportunity for Designlab to put design more at the forefront of the brand.”
A “Human-Centered” Brand
One of the themes that emerged from Whitman Emorson’s research of our users and our brand was that of “human centeredness” and that our students, alumni, and mentors overwhelmingly felt a kind of connectedness to the Designlab community. This manifested itself for our users both in feeling that Designlab was “invested in student success” and “a feeling of not being alone in the learning journey.” As such, we wanted to make sure that this human centeredness came through in our updated brand – both from a visual and a messaging perspective.