Hello! My name is Jo ☺

CrowdRiff Brand Refresh 

September 2018

About CrowdRiff
CrowdRiff is a visual marketing platform tailor-made for marketing teams at destinations, museums, attractions and resorts. CrowdRiff connects brands and consumers alike with captivating imagery that makes a real impact with the day to day decisions on what we do, buy and eat. 

My Role
Responsibilities include strategic planning and research, exploration, visual design, branding. Worked closely with the design team and various department leads to create a refined visual language for the brand. 

Why refresh? 

CrowdRiff continues to grow as a company and the goal was to stand out from the competitors and continue to be market leaders in travel and tourism. CrowdRiff started to expand and explore into new markets such as museums, attractions and resorts and wanted to create first and lasting impressions. 

The brand was beginning to look outdated and was in need of a facelift during the time. The issues were the lack of consistency and brand image, as the brand was juggling between 3 primary colours that did not work well together.

Limited by the visual language established in 2016, a brand audit was performed to better understand, define and unify the CrowdRiff brand.

Let's stick to one logo

The CrowdRiff brand was struggling to work around three different versions of our logo. The logos were constantly competing with each other making the company feel like three separate brands. As a result, the brand team decided to narrow it down to one chevron colour in the "new blue". 

New colours?

Similar issue with the logo, the previous primary colours only worked separately and if brought together they were always competing. We removed the original primary colours all together and created a new set of colours based around one of the secondary blues in the original colour pallet. 

Made adjustments to the original blue so it is easily translatable for web and print. Secondary colours were created in conjunction to the new blue called "Leah Blue". We created a darker blue (Jo Blue) and a vibrant green (Ryan Green) to be used sparingly. (All named after the former design team at CrowdRiff).

Colour for print and digital 

The original brand colours were only meant for digital applications and the CrowdRiff platform. They were not made for print applications. The updated colour pallet was translated to HEX and CMYK values.

Font clean up

The entire Source Sans Pro family was used in the past. A massive clean up was needed and the font family was simplified into three distinctive font weights: regular, bold and black. Having options is great but using multiple font weights started to over complicate the brand.

CrowdRiff is all about visuals 

CrowdRiff is all about visuals and we wanted to continue to use photography and have it be the main visual anchor. 

The imagery should invoke aspirational and engaging reactions with authenticity that is heavily focused on travel and inspires exploration. Imagery to avoid are ones that appear to look cliché, unrecognizable, staged or heavily stock. 

Photo credit: shridevij, emcapps, stephloureiro, amanjotksandhu, standiel, brendaraa, vietvinh, lucusluxton

Creating custom icons: Rifficons

Worked closely with Product Designer, Ryan, and created "Rifficons". Illustrative icons that represented CrowdRiff’s love of travel, tourism and technology. 

Use of angles

Angles have always been ingrained in the previous brand. The team made use of the chevron in multiple cases throughout the brand. Initially, the chevron served as a significant design element but became diluted over time. With the update, inspiration from the chevron has been taken into account, and its angle is now appropriately used for images and background elements.