ProfitWell Brand
As Visual Designer for ProfitWell, I worked on a major rebranding initiative to update the look and feel of the company. My team worked closely with the CEO and CPO to define the brand personality, create illustrations and a new website, and update all the touchpoints of the ProfitWell brand.
Team
Stephanie Irigoyen, Visual Designer
Rachel Trudel, Product Designer
Patrick Campbell, CEO
Facundo Chamut, CPO
1
Brand Exploration
When I joined the team, ProfitWell was in a state of flux with its brand. While they had recently updated the look and feel of their website, it wasn't exactly where they wanted it to be. Their old marketing materials still matched the old website and were generally inconsistent in appearance. I spearheaded an initiative to create brand principles and develop a consistent and more modern feel for ProfitWell that expressed who they were becoming rather than who they used to be.
Auditing Our Assets
Our first step in rebranding was to take a visual audit of what we already had. I collected all of our materials from the new website, old website, display ads, social media posts, mobile app, web app, slide decks, one-pagers, t-shirts, and more. Once it was all inside a Miro board, the team took a collective look at what they did and didn't like from all the different pieces. It was also a great way for us to create an inventory of what would need to be updated.
Defining the Brand Personality
After looking at the landscape of ProfitWell, we began an exercise to define the brand. Each team member sorted through keywords based on what they felt fit the company. This exercise helped us find the principles we agreed on and disagreed on.
2
Colors
Once we had defined our brand personality, the next step was to look at our existing color palette and consider how it fit into our new direction. While our current palette hit many of the same notes as similar companies in our market, we felt it had become too stiff and that moving forward, it would be more difficult to work within.
Main Palette
We wanted to keep the color story of the original palette but bring more life to it. By adding some saturation and making minor adjustments, our new palette was more bright and sophisticated.
With the new palette, we brought Navy to the forefront to balance out our ProfitWell Teal. Our brand audit showed that red and orange frequently appeared in our materials, so we added them as accent colors.
3
Typography
At the start of this project, ProfitWell was inconsistently using different fonts. We narrowed it down to using Roboto as our base font, but we wanted to add a more polished touch to the brand.
Meta Serif Pro
To balance out the clean and crisp sans-serif we used across the board, we decided to add a sophisticated serif font. We went through many iterations to hone in on what the right font would be.
4
Illustrations
We felt that a big guiding force in the brand would be illustrations that humanized our complex and abstract products. Because of this, we spent a large amount of time finding the right illustration style for ProfitWell, and exploring how it would look when applied to our different assets.
Research
Our first step was in collecting as much inspiration as we could. We dug through the internet to pull together a huge variety of styles that would fit our brand and be able to scale as the company grew.
When looking for an art style that would fit our product, we thought about innovative and fun designs that would break the mold from what other subscription analytics companies were doing.
Collecting Inspiration
Our next step was to gather as many images as we could with different styles of illustration. We used Miro so that we could all collaborate and add our own images. After doing research into a lot of different art styles, the standout was Retro Futurism and mid-century World Fair designs.
Style Exploration
Inspired by Ryan Putnam’s illustration method, we worked through different illustration styles by defining three distinct styles we liked, and deciding what fit our brand best.
We chose the direction that we felt would scale best as we grew and that stood out more from the industry standards.
Application & Documentation
After evaluating what style fit our brand, we started testing the style in the real world by applying it to existing assets. Once we could see the illustrations in different settings, we made adjustments to the style.
Iconography
We customized icons from the Streamline library and applied our two primary to add vibrance. These icons are used extensively throughout the website, marketing materials, and sales decks.
5
Event Branding
A big part of our sales and marketing strategies involved events, so it was important we created a brand that would allow room for this. Our goal was to use the same basic materials of the ProfitWell brand in a different way. This was the space where two of our brand principles, Unconventional and Expertise, were emphasized the most.
Recur Branding
Our annual Recur conference for subscription professionals is held every December. For the 2019 event, we wanted to rebrand it to fit within the overall ProfitWell brand, but also be its own entity. With an event at this scale, we had to consider how this would look across digital, print, and other event elements.
For a sophisticated look, we leaned more heavily on the darker colors and gradients from the new palette, and added New Media Purple to replace our Orange. We created new flourishes to enhance the existing ProfitWell brand style, and made animations that brought them to life.
Recur Team
Events Manager: Erin Phinney
Creative Direction: Dan Callahan, Stephanie Irigoyen
Design: Stephanie Irigoyen, Allissa Chan
