Story behind “The Millennial Wave”
Every brand has a story to tell and a big piece of that is the visual components of the brand starting from logo to color palettes to typefaces. Here is a story of #Heptagon‘s visual branding revamp.
This is how the story begins. We, the design team at Heptagon were given a simple mandate “Upgrade our brand identity to represent the evolution of the company and create a new visual language that is future-ready”. It has been almost 3 years since brand Heptagon came to life, but so much has changed in the last 34+ months – from a small upstart in Coimbatore with just 10 people we have grown into a 140+ member team spread across multiple locations.
From one client we have grown to serve over 50+ clients, but our original identity did not do justice to our evolution the branding started to feel dated. We wanted our brand to reflect energy, momentum, and growth we have been witnessing over the years. Our existing identity reflected our start-up roots, a solid (and a bit obvious) Heptagon with no defined color palette. We realized it was time to update the solid geometric Heptagon into something dynamic which we could call our own. We went through a dozen iterations and looked into the real world for inspiration.
The Logo Process
Shape
As the name of our brand is heptagon, we decided to retain the 7 sided polygon as the primary motif. However, we did explore a lot of shapes including that of an irregular heptagon.
Though this shape was eccentric, we couldn’t continue with it as it would be too much of a transition from the old logo to the new one. So, we explored a regular heptagon.
Pattern
After deciding on the shape, we sketched out a lot of patterns inside the heptagon shape. We tried patterns with rays representing dynamism and optimism. The challenge that we faced was to make the patterns symmetrical. Heptagon, being an odd numbered polygon, finding symmetry was hard.
The “Rays” logo which came close but never really came close to becoming “the one”!
When we decided to move beyond the rays we started looking at nature for metaphors, the best metaphor we could think of was that of the ocean and its waves.
The waves had a deep resonance with who we are as a company, we as people are always striving for innovation and hungry to reach new shores and the wave also represents our vision to bring the new waves of technology to the shores of our customers.
We picked the wave, that too is in its elevated state to show growth as we have grown big over the past two years and we always strive to keep the momentum up.
We also changed the typeface and also the brand font family from a playful Panton to Rubik which felt like the right grown up font to evolve into.
Colour
Before the redesign, Heptagon didn’t have a singular brand colour. We were using multiple shades of blue, green and grey. Thought it helped in designing cool logos it failed at building a consistent brand experience. Aligning with the colour psychology, we started with bright and bold colours to signify energy and youthfulness. We decided to go with the current shade of “Grown-up” Blue (partly it looked great and also partly as it was in the family of blue used by our parent company Quess Corp). Hey and also, the ocean is blue so what more reasons does one need 🙂
We explored gradients and monochromatic shades and tints and solids of blue. Then arrived at a solid shade of blue as the colour should be minimal when it’s combined with a pattern.
Branding
We then redesigned the brand experience from the ground up on all creative touchpoints, from redesigning our website to reimagining our office interiors all with the new logo and the vibrant colour palette.
Below are some examples of how the brand experience was carried across multiple digital and physical touchpoints.
Hope you like the all new Heptagon brand experience, we would love to hear your feedback. You can reach out to our design team at design@heptagon.in
