So we did a thing… more specifically, a complete overhaul of our organization’s brand and website! From colors to slide decks to micro-interactions on our homepage, we tweaked and tested all of the ins and outs of our new brand and website to ensure our message is clear, and our look is polished. The visionary leading these efforts was our one and only Design Director, Kate Collazo, who has been documenting her thoughts behind each change along the way. While months of work went into this process, the focus of her blog will be on the before and after, with particular attention to the colors and logo transformation. We hope this will provide some insight into why we changed our look and give readers insights into design decisions.
If you are at all familiar with the lifecycle of a B2B startup, building a reliable product with a market fit ranks slightly higher above crafting the perfect mark. Our founders envisioned a brand that embodied the visual concepts of linguistics, litigation, and technology. From our name to our logo, you can find traces of each category sprinkled throughout: LitLingo (a portmanteau of “litigation” and “lingo”). This overarching wifi symbol trickles down to a subtle set of ellipses. While the execution was rough, the thought was there, and considering they both come from the world of engineering (not a swipe at engineers’ creative capacity, just a slightly accurate generalization), it was the perfect temporary solution.
One could argue that the form of a logo is somewhat irrelevant and that it’s merely a vessel to be filled by other branding elements such as company personality/voice, marketing content, etc. For example, the Nike swish is a meaningless tapered stroke without the colossal force of cultural meaning and brand attitude behind it. Which begs the question, why even bother changing anything?
Because we intend to make a splash!
Our mission is to help every organization communicate better, not just in financial services or healthcare companies but across the board. We intend for our logo to become a branding staple as recognizable as Steve Jobs’ partially eaten apple and as universal as McDonald’s golden arches. After a couple of years of hustling to build a go-to-market product that dazzles, now is the time to strengthen our foundations and fine-tune how we want to present our solution to the corporate world.
After we secured our original logo, we created a straightforward website intended to serve as a launching pad until we brought on the right resources internally. While the first iteration fulfilled its purpose, we found there was a lot of information without the proper focus. After some valuable colleague and customer feedback, it is evident that our website’s design was muddling our message and leaving visitors unsure about our mission.
As soon as I started here, I began researching and building our new brand. From new colors to a reimagined logo, I knew this would be a complete and total overhaul of our look and feel. Foremost, I knew we needed colors that communicated a welcoming feeling because we are here to support you in finding the information you need to inform better choices while you work. Thus, we stayed far away from reds and blacks. Also, our product is a new concept, and we wanted to ensure that we are not one in a sea of similar. For this reason, we ruled out ubiquitous blues you find across the business world today. Lastly, we wanted to convey that we are serious about what we are trying to accomplish: helping good people avoid bad mistakes. So our colors are controlled and lean into incorporating darker values (e.g., dark green, gray, etc.).
In our new mark, you can see all the elements (positive and negative spaces) are made of one repeated square block. Moreover, the brackets that form the outer square represent the search and locating aspect of LitLingo’s technology. Finally, the “L” within is the LitLingo, and the yellow message bubble is the content that we find that matters. That yellow message is the way LitLingo saves your organization from reputation ruin, from business halting litigation, from sending out the wrong message to the people you’re trying to reach.
Here at LitLingo, we are more than excited about our product! We are buzzing with anticipation for how it will impact the workplace, and we can’t wait to tell you about it. We believe our product is a big deal. It’s a quality thing, and it deserves a quality brand to live in. We believe in the importance of good branding, so we have taken our time to get it just right, and now we are so proud to share what we have created.
