Paper Rebranding Proposal

Branding, Graphic Design

Project Overview

This project was an internal proposal at Paper in 2023, where I worked as a Senior Designer. The proposal was spearheaded by the Senior Manager of the Marketing team, and was aimed to elevate the existing brand to reflect the expanded offerings and reposition the company on the market.

My Contributions

I was working as a part of the internal team of designers at a Marketing department, led by our Senior Manager. Each designer came up with proposals that were later critiqued, refined, and presented to the upper management. I was working on all parts of the proposal, including initial concepts, wordmarks and typography refinement, colour scheme, and testing the branding on typical marketing assets.

Background

The brief

Paper is an education technology company that provides unlimited chat-based tutoring for secondary school students across North America. I was a part of the Marketing team at Paper between 2020 and 2023.

The problem
The need for updating the brand came from the initiative to structure the key parts of the brand - mission, vision, values, tone of voice, persona and more. As of 2023, the company existed for about 7 years and experienced rapid growth in the last 2 years, but these key parts of the brand were not clearly defined.

Leadership decided to survey the employees, stemming from the idea that all of us already are united by values, they just need to be articulated. After a series of questionnaires, the values were defined as: Equity, Learning, Innovation and Community. With that, the Marketing team embarked on a series of workshops to define the vision, tone of voice, brand persona and the rest.

After all this work, it became clear that the current visual expression did not match the personality that the stakeholders agreed on the company should express. Also, the existing branding was becoming stale, and the team received feedback that it was "loud" with really bright colours and very chunky, bold typography. The current logo also became constricting, making everything very rectangular, angular and boxy.

Existing Paper branding, introduced in 2021

The proposed solution
The main idea when the team embarked on this project was the concept of a "flexible brand" - a branding system that would be highly adaptive and scalable. Paper had multiple audiences requiring different tones of voice and messaging, and have also recently acquired two more brands that were planned to be integrated into the offering. Paper was positioning itself as a Educational Support System, not just a tutoring service. That brought about the fact that we needed to change absolutely everything, including the logo, logo mark, typography, colours and layouts.

Research

Searching for ideas

The main task while searching for ideas was to find a sense of direction and movement for the new logo. The mark also had to be abstract to allow for multiple interpretations. I was tasked with concentrating on ideas for the logo mark, as the team has already agreed on the new font for the project - Plus Jakarta Sans.

Inspirations for the logo mark
During my research phase, I was gravitating towards examples that were dynamic, that were pointing towards something, and that were with a good balance between abstract and a recognisable shape.

Plus Jakarta Sans Font
This font was chosen by the team for the flexibility and variety of glyphs, which worked perfectly for our project.

Proposed Logo Mark

After a few iterations and experimentation, I was ready to present my idea for the new logo mark. I felt that it was a strong option, as the mark was abstract, but could be interpreted in a few different ways:

bent sheet of paper
book spine
repeating the shape of a bowl on a letter P
abstract swoosh
forward motion/arrow

The proposed mark with the wordmark

Wordmark and font pairing exploration
Even though we already had a proposed font, I still wanted to explore futher. I tried a few other options, and have also added body font pairings. After several tests, I was suspecting that Plus Jakarta Sans could potentially be problematic as a text font. The readability was a little off due to jumps in letter-spacing, so I felt the need to try other compatible fonts as a text font with strong readability characteristics.

Adding colour
After that, I experimented with using the mark as a design element, and have tried to add colour to the full logo. I felt it had potential as a layout tool, and as a shape to use in multiple settings.

Interpreting the mark for sub-brands
Another challenge for this rebrand as a flexible system was that the new logo had to be adaptable for the several sub-brands that were under a Paper umbrella. I experimented with re-interpreting this mark to create logos for sub-brands, and I felt it did a good job as well.

After playing with the mark positioning, I felt that this way the logo looks even more dynamic. I was pleased with how the mark could turn from a static abstract shape to a dynamic with just a turn. The team settled on this version to include in the presentation.

Alternative Logo Mark

In addition to the first idea, I came up with the alternative mark, playing on the diamond shapes creating both an open book, and an arrow pointing upward. The reaction to it was not as strong as to the first concept, but it was still included in the presentation to leadership as an additional option.

Wordmark Exploration

After presenting logo mark options, the team set on exploring the logo wordmark. As the font offered a lot of flexibility in terms of glyphs, I wanted to try every possible combination of different alternates to find what subtle changes can offer in terms of feel for the logo.

Explorations for wordmark glyphs
I was working with a teammate's proposed logo mark for this task, a "quarter circle" shape that was reminiscent of a paper folded corner. After trying a lot of combinations, I settled on 6 favourites, which I ten narrowed down to 3 options. Here are excerpts from my presentation to the team.

Explorations for the icon
We needed the logo to also work in super small sizes, so here are my tryouts and analysis for the icon and the favicon size.

Further explorations for the logo

Colours

We spent a lot of time as a team working on a colour palette for the new brand, with a lot of revisions and refinements. We were aiming for the palette to reflect the brand personality that emerged from our extensive workshops: inspiring, genuine, passionate, empathic. We felt that this was best expressed through colour, as it's one of the primary emotional components of how the brand is perceived.

Original colour palette from 2021
The problems with the original palette were the heaviness, I would even say loudness of the colours, almost approaching pure RGB values. To offset that, the greyscale palette was designed to have the warmer, brown tones that were used on backgrounds. After a while, the greyscale tints felt really muddy and sort of drab, and the colour palette overall lacked nuance and warmth.

Exploring the new colour palette
I started working on the new palette with the starting point suggested by a teammate. While I felt like it was a good match for the personality we wanted to express, I wanted to explore adding another colour, and reducing the saturation of the colours a bit. I also wanted to ensure that the palette could produce the most of colour combinations that didn't vibrate, and had enough contrast.

Final colour palette
After a lot of tinkering and refinement, the team agreed on the palette shown below. I worked on fine-tuning the colour combinations, and have worked on the shades and tints.

Testing for accessibility
I ensured the new palette is fully accessible, and here are the results of the test I performed with the Chroma online tool.

Testing use cases

With the colours, the font, and the wordmark agreed upon, and still working with different logo mark options, the team worked on applying the new branding to the variety of assets that Marketing creates on a regular basis. Here are a few test assets that I created to test the new branding in action.

Conclusions

What I learned

Unfortunately, the whole rebranding project had to be paused due to unforeseen changes in the organisation. While I contributed a lot to the final presentation of the new brand that our Senior Manager made to the company management, my logo marks were not selected as a final logo option.
Even considering all these circumstances, it was an immensely interesting project to work on, and I'm pleased with my contributions. I learned a great deal though this process, and discovered more about my strengths as a designer, and the areas where I need to improve my skills.