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.
Branding and visual design
Responsibilities include research, brainstorming, exploration, visual design, branding, and production. Worked closely with the design team and various department leads to create a refined visual language for the brand.
Team
Joanne Vongphachan, Designer
Ryan Krieg, Product Designer
Leah Conway, Web Designer and Developer
Directors and Contributors
Amrita Gurney, VP Marketing
Mark Mezzapelli. VP Sales & Partnership
Dan Holowack, Co-Founder & CEO
Our Goal is to stand out and solidify the CrowdRiff brand as we continue to be market leaders in travel & tourism and enter new markets. To have an overall consistency at every touchpoint of our brand.
Why did we choose to do a refresh?
As CrowdRiff continues to grow as a company our goal is to stand out from the competitors and continue to be market leaders in travel and tourism. We recently started to expand and explore into new markets such as museums, attractions and resorts and want to create a first and lasting impression.
The brand was beginning to look outdated and was in need of a facelift. We wanted to address issues like the lack of consistency and brand image, as we were juggling between 3 primary colours that did not work when used together.
Limited by the visual language established in 2016, we performed a brand audit to better understand, define and unify the CrowdRiff brand and to make it easily digestible for the whole company.
Keeping the 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 brand feel like three separate brands. The brand team decided to narrow it down to one chevron colour in our new blue.
Why we chose our new colours
Similar issue with the logo, the previous primary colours only worked separately and if brought together they were always competing. We got rid of 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.
We made adjustments to the original blue so it is easily translatable for web and print. We created secondary colours in conjunction to our new blue called "Leah Blue". We created a darker blue (Jo Blue) and a vibrant green (Ryan Green) to be used sparingly.
Colour for Print and Digital
Our original brand colours were only meant for digital applications and our CrowdRiff platform. They were not made for print applications. With our new colour pallet we have translated the RGB values into HEX and CMYK values.
Tidying up Source Sans Pro
In the past we used the whole Source Sans Pro family. Today we have simplified it to three distinctive font weights: regular, bold and black. Having options is great but using multiple font weights started to over complicate the brand. Simplifying the fonts also allowed less room for error when CrowdRiff employees use it for their own decks and proposals.
We're all about visuals
Our brand is all about visuals and we wanted to continue to use photography and have it be our main visual anchor.
The imagery we look for invoke aspirational and engaging reactions with authenticity that is heavily focused on travel and inspires exploration. Today, we use a mixture of stock imagery and user-generated images found through CrowdRiff. We tend to avoid imagery that appears to look cliché, unrecognizable, staged or heavily stock.
Photo credit: shridevij, emcapps, stephloureiro, amanjotksandhu, standiel, brendaraa, vietvinh, lucusluxton
Creating custom icons: Rifficons
Working with our Product Designer, we created "Rifficons" during one of our quarterly hack days. We wanted to create an illustrative icon set that represents CrowdRiff’s love of travel, visuals, museums and technology. They are used throughout all of our departments and materials and we plan to continue to grow the collection.
Use of angles
Angles have always been engrained in our previous brand, we made use of our chevron in multiple use cases throughout our brand. We no longer use our chevron as a design element as it was beginning to dilute our logo. Today we use inspiration from our chevron and continue to use angle appropriately for images and background elements.
Templates for internal use
During the brand refresh we also considered creating templated slide decks for on screen viewing and large screen presentations. A resource for those at CrowdRiff who create decks and presentations on a daily basis.
These deck templates have over 100+ customizable slide designs for easy implementation and use. Below are a few examples of the variations of slides CrowdRiffers are able to work with.
We have also created templates that are used specifically for sales (discovery to close) decks, customer onboarding and other internal training decks.
