Teamspective — 2019

Challenge

Early on we realized that the value the co-founders were aiming to capture and provide to customers was going to be hard to communicate. The core value and competitive advantage was going to be based on driving cultural, behavioral and organizational change, something that takes some time and effort from the customer before starting to see measurable results.

They needed to focus on building a strong brand from the very beginning. To make this possible, they would need a consistent and well-thought visual identity to work with.

Approach

1– Identifying the known and unknown

I’d been involved in all the activities the co-founders had done so far; gathering and analyzing insights about the market and the potential target audience, framing the customer problems and pain points to address and prototyping a potential solution. I had enough insights on the target user and buyer personas, the competitive landscape as well as the potential solution and competitive advantage of the company to build upon.

On topics such as brand, tone of voice or visual identity, there was basically nothing defined. I had the luxury and challenge of literally starting from scratch.

2– Setting the direction

To create the first visual identity for the product, company and brand, I still needed to concretely align with the co-founders what are the exact values on different levels they want to communicate and which feelings and emotions they want to trigger in their target audience. There was very little time available to carry out this phase. The process to land on something actionable needed to be extremely lightweight.

After considering a bunch of options from my toolkit, I proposed two workshops for the co-founders.

• The experience goals workshop
• The value tree workshop

Both workshops turned out to be of extremely high value. We formed a shared understanding of both the values our brand needs to communicate on various levels as well as the emotional feelings we want to trigger and emphasize.

The main outcome of the workshops was a brand statement formed using the final selected keywords from the experience goals workshop.

Teamspective helps people show they care about each other and their organization by daring them to engage in thoughtful and insightful exchanges of feedback. This way of collaboration spreads organically as more people join in.

Now I had something to lean on and start my visual exploration. On top of this, the co-founders now felt more structured and aligned in their thoughts on what the whole company, product and brand was going to be all about.

3– Exploring the visual space

With the outcome of the workshops on top of my mind, I worked on my own doing visual exploration and creating a consistent visual language that matches and emphasizes the brand statement. I worked in parallel with the logo and with finding a good combination of typography, color, shape, iconography and imagery.

I also had to have the constraints in mind. This visual identity would have to work even during times when there’s basically a zero-budget and no dedicated designer in the team. My goal was to create an identity as unique as possible while using fairly simple custom elements and maximizing the use of freely available visual assets.

4– And the winner is…

After exploring numerous logo metaphors and visual avenues, I landed on a concept that simply felt right. When I presented my proposal to the co-founders, they also thought it captures the values and emotions they want to communicate.

This is the first Teamspective visual identity 1.0 in its final form.

Logo

The primary Teamspective logo is a logotype using the primary brand font, Nunito Sans, in the daring ExtraBold font weight. It is complemented with an imperfectly drawn circle in “Daring Red”, the primary brand color.

The imperfect circle illustrates organic and natural thinking; there are no mathematically perfect circles in nature. Similarly, there is no perfect human being or a perfect skill. We want to encourage people to accept the imperfect in themselves and in others without judgement.

Typography

I wanted to find a typeface that is not too common, but still reliable and flexible, with good readability and a full set of weights, that works well for both body and display copy. It also needed to be open-source and easy to implement on the web. I explored both two typeface and single typeface combinations.

The Teamspective typography consists of a single typeface in different weights for display and body, Nunito Sans. It’s the slightly less known non-rounded terminal version of Nunito. It works extremely well with the brand colors and shapes, bringing the brand statement to life.

To complete the typographic toolset, I paired the best-matching script, Gloria Hallelujah, to be thoughtfully used in small amounts here and there, for example in complementing side notes.

Color

I started the experimentation with complementary colors and landed on a double-complementary color scheme for the brand.

• Daring Red – Primary brand color and logo color
• Thoughtful Blue – Primary UI tint color
• Caring Green – Secondary accent color
• Insightful Yellow – Secondary accent color

There’s one more color, Organic Grey. It’s a grey slightly tinted toward beige, to be used in backgrounds instead of pure shades of grey.

Shape

Imperfection in circles, lines and any kind of shapes is the main theme in the Teamspective visual identity. This imperfection gives a human touch to what we see on the screen, making it feel organic, human and caring.

To give it a bit more daring edge, I introduced the hand-drawn-like rough doodles.

Imagery

The main ingredient of imagery is the abundant use of images of people in social situations. They should feel as authentic as possible, not like typical “team spirit” stock images. This way they communicate real collaboration, thought and care between humans.

Images without humans and human interaction can also be used to illustrate a metaphor or symbolic meaning, as long as they’re tied to context in the copywriting. These types of images should nevertheless be much less frequent.

All images are used in principle without overlaying text, filters or other elements, just as they were originally provided by the photographer, with one exception: cropping with an imperfect circle or rectangle.

Iconography

To provide a wide range of ready-made icons, I needed to pair a ready-made icon set to the visual identity. Font Awesome, a well-known open-source icon library, turned out to play very well together with the typography and form of the overall visual identity. In addition to being extremely well crafted with accessibility and other important aspects in mind, it has been made easy to apply in vector format both on the web and the desktop.

The Teamspective visual identity applies these icons in “small” and “large” variations. Small is just applying them as they come. Large is a “pimped” customized version.

I continued experimenting with minor variations based on feedback from the first presentation to the co-founders. In the end they chose the original variation.

5– Testing with the target audience

To see how people outside our own little bubble react to the visuals, I run a five second test with a few test persons within the potential target group. The response of the test persons matched surprisingly well with our experience goals and brand statement.

6– Putting it all together

To make sure to have a seamless handover to the co-founders, I worked side by side with them for a while. I applied the visual identity to their first sales deck and created a visual identity guideline, among other things.

Outcome

A couple of months after the handover Teamspective went live on the web and on LinekdIn. The sales deck had also been in heavy use in meetings with potential customers.

Even though the brand is still evolving as new insights keep flying in, the first version of the visual identity and it's guidelines set a solid, yet flexible enough ground to build upon. Our collaborative work together has also helped the co-founders concretizing their vision and setting the direction, especially from an identity and brand perspective.