Kualo

This is one of my all time favourite branding project and it is going to be hard to condensed everything we did into a single case study. 

After interviewing key members of the Kualo team we conducted brand audits, competitive research and ran a series of hugely successful user surveys to paint a true picture of peoples perceptions internal and external to the company. A survey is more valuable when the pool of participants is larger than one, so we took a different approach to incentivise participation that tied into Kualo’s ethics: instead of offer a voucher we offered to plant 10 trees for every completed survey. This generated 458 response — far more than we would have anticipated. 

After conducting an audit of the original identity it was apparent that there was a smorgasbord of different components: icons, colours, typefaces etc. that felt like they were competing against each other. There was no harmony and no sense of their strong green and ethical credentials. The identity leaned heavily into the cheaper end of the hosting spectrum which would feel at odds with corporate enterprise clientele.

One instruction was clear from the client: do not change the logo. However, the original logo contained colour of overlapping blue and yellow bars that restricted its use. It only really worked on a white background. So, we persuaded the Kualo team to use a single colour logo that would work on both dark and light backgrounds — essential for a modern identity.

We also massively reduced the colour palette to two colours painstakingly selecting a mint green that was warm, inviting, corporate without being stuffy and steered clear of the tranditional bright green used in recycling logos.

A logo does not maketh a brand. The brand is the company’s sould, its identity is the clothes it wears. This is why we developed a number of foundational stones for the brand, including:

• A brand narrative
• Mission statement
• Brand positioning statement
• Brand personality
• Brand values
• A tagline: Hosting tomorrow’s world

It was only when we understood the brand’s soul that we could start to think about the elements of the identity.

Inspiration

The inspiration for the brand came in the middle of the night. I was pondering the answer to the question, ‘What does Kualo do?’ and the answer, ‘Complex hosting made beautifully simple’. What is both complex and beautiful? A toy from my childhood: The Spirograph. It is used to created complex patterns using different coloured pencils. A network of lines connected. A perfect visual metaphor for how the internet works.

We got to work creating a series of patterns that we could use as graphical hook for the identity. This coupled with the new logo, typeface and tagline created a powerful combination

It would be an understatement to say how much we all loved the identity. It was certainly poles apart from the current identity and would appeal to both existing and future clients. However we do not stop at just the Spirograph inspired patterns, we also developed a similar idea using a kaleidoscope to create imagery that for world celebration days that aligned with teh company’s ethics, like World Ocean Day and World Earth Day for which we designed beautiful posters and adverts.

We capture all the thinking and encapsulated into a beautiful set of brand guidelines that also contain how-to instructions for the Kualo team to create their own kaleidoscope images.