I can’t speak for the whole Recess team, but when I hear the word “rebrand” my ears perk up, my mouth waters, my geese bump. What can I say, as a creative, I live for those opportunities. For a creative team, it’s kinda the holy grail of projects. An opportunity to use every creative and diagnostic tool we have as an agency. However, whether it’s a logo redesign or a top to bottom complete recreation of a client’s brand, the opportunity is equally daunting as it is exciting. There’s a massive amount of weight and responsibility during this process.
During a rebrand we’re many times reshaping the way a client’s customers perceive and experience their company as a whole. We’re telling their story. Sometimes we’re completely rewriting it, and other times we’re simply giving it a shot in the arm. Regardless of what that story is, it’s our responsibility as an agency to tell it correctly. However, anyone can simply retell someone else’s story, you learn some of the important details, make sure you don’t forget all the fun parts, and regurgitate what you’ve heard. But who wants to hear someone tell a story that they weren’t even there for?
This is our mission. To become so assimilated to our clients, to know them front to back and top to bottom in such great detail that we’re not merely repeating their same old story. We’re bonding our weird looking, lopsided, right brained, creatively minded selves to their DNA, and becoming a part of who they are. It’s only after we’ve grafted ourselves into our clients that we can then tell their story together. How does one actually do this? Work. Lots and lots of work. Hard work. But remember when you were a kid walking into class for a test that you knew you were going to ace? It wasn’t just a feeling. You knew you were about to slay that test because not only did you spend the late nights and early mornings to learn the material, but you actually liked what you were studying. This is what we strive to do with our clients, and it’s the story we want to tell with our new brand.
The R
The basic structure of the “R” logo mark, was first inspired by practicality. As an evolution of the existing dodgeball logo, we wanted to create a simple mark for use as an icon. Something we could use in the tiniest of applications like the little browser tab icon on the website, yet would feel just as comfortable pasted around the office and on every living piece of agency branded materials. After all, we’d have to live with whatever we produced for the foreseeable future.
We also wanted to produce a mark that appeared modern, but in a more “timeless modern” than “trendy modern” sort of way. Something inspired by the past but looking towards the future. To do this we chose the typeface “Futura”. Yeah, we get it. Kind of a cliche. But we’re cool with cliches when they look as good as this typeface does. Designed in 1927 by Paul Renner, “Futura” was created to stand alone from a backdrop of decorative flourished typefaces that were synonymous with the time. Paul sought to create a geometrically sound typeface only breaking its geometry to balance and stabilize the letterforms. Basing nearly every letterform off the simplicity of the “circle”, Paul Renner literally created a typeface for Recess Creative (our old logo is a big red ball) almost a hundred years ago. We just couldn’t pass it up.
So we grabbed the outline of the letter “R”, dropped its counter-forms, and placed it in our circle. Waalaaaa! A cool looking logo, but not a brand.
The Brand
Pulling from our mission, vision, and values, we know we’re not an agency that simply wants to put our stamp on everything. Like chameleons, we become part of our clients and the work we do for them, adapting and changing to solve the problems at hand, but never changing the heart and soul of who we are. So we set out to create a brand to do the exact same. While the basic structure of the “R” is never changing (hopefully remaining as timeless and untouched as the typeface that fathered it), what’s framed inside its shape is purposefully flexible and ever evolving. There are zero limitations to what it could be. Because in the end, why would we ever settle for one idea.
As a creative agency, nearly everything about us is always changing, and that’s a good thing. From what inspires us and the work we do, to the type of sandwich Jen packs for lunch and the random hobby I’ll pick up next week, there are just so many damn options. It’s our brand after all, and since we’re making up our own rules, why not pick everything?