Category: Agency Life
January 17, 2024 / Miles Marmo
Agency Squid Rebrands! (again...)
There are many reasons to rebrand an organization. Maybe you’re going after a new audience. Or the business has changed in a significant way? Possibly the internal and external perception of your brand isn’t aligned. Perhaps you think your brand is outdated and you’re losing relevance.
Another possibility is that one of the co-founders of your organization came in one morning and said we needed to evolve our brand.
That’s what happened to Agency Squid.
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At the start
When we launched the Agency in 2015, we felt we needed to look trustworthy, confident, and professional yet playfully appropriate for a creative company. We chose a classic, authoritative font for the logotype and complemented it with a gesturing “arm” on the “Q”. The brand system included a stylized illustrative mark of our namesake cephalopod with reaching arms and large, knowledgeable, perceptive eyes.
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After 5 years of experience and growth, we evolved from a “Does the world need another agency” beta concept to a viable business.
Five years was a perfect time to pause and reflect on whether our brand expression represented what we had grown into and the clients we served. Our resolve was to shift our brand to express the confidence we had in ourselves and our clients. The custom sans serif typography spoke to the work our clients wanted from us – bold, direct, and progressive. The past round illustrative mark matured into a flexible alternative to the logotype in the brand system.
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Now we’re 9 years in the making. Why the change?
I’m one of the co-founders of Squid and having been in the brand/communications business since 1978, you have an intuition about these things. But when you work with a powerful creative team, as I do, who questions everything and demands strategic thinking to underpin all of our work, they want to know “why?” Nine years of business provides a vantage point that gives insight and guidance to the evaluation of our brand. We have constantly expanded through each year, not only in the work our clients ask us to do, but also our geographic playing field has expanded nationally and internationally. The complexity of problems we are asked to solve includes brand launches, repositions, expansions, internal and external communications, integrated traditional and digital campaigns, nuanced market segmentation and targeting ... and on and on.
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