Note: This post is the 4th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
In the following interview, you will hear from two Designers that had an integral role in our brand redesign. Alexi is a Designer working in the Product realm and Isiah works within Marketing. So, lets get started!
What has been the most exciting and/or interesting part of creating the visual identity for the new WhitePages brand?
Alexi:
Where to start…there are so many moving pieces involved with rebranding an entire website. I guess if I was to choose a favorite moment, it would have to be the development of our new color palette and logo which finally emerged after much market research and analysis, experimentation, iteration, discussions, and heated debate that led to the development of our new color palette and logo. The color choice wasn’t easy; although the selection of our logo helped to drive the creation of our color palette.
Let me explain. We started with several logo iterations, slowly narrowed it down to our top three, gaining executive approval all along the way; we finally decided on a logo that incorporates a swath of color under the word “white.”
This swath represents the mark of a highlighter which implies the action of “finding” – we are the #1 people search site so what better place to represent this then in our logo!
After the logo selection, we knew that we wanted to stick to a standard highlighter color since that’s what the swath represents; this limited us to a choice of hot pink, yellow, light blue, or green.
Light blue was immediately eliminated because, as some of you have noticed, a very large percentage of logos incorporate blue as their primary color. Hot pink…well, although we have seen this work for some company logos, we had many concerns about how the color pink would vary from one monitor to the next; the same goes for yellow, on an older monitor, bright colors like yellow may appear washed out or even worse may not show at all.
We were left with green as the logical choice, which was great because it was the crowd favorite from the start. Green is a contemporary color that exudes sincerity and trust, not to mention, it’s one of the most relaxing colors on the eyes.
I’d regret it if I didn’t mention how excited I am about the new design opportunities that we’ve gained with our new logo. We finally have what some refer to as a “bug” – it’s basically a smaller tag or mark derived from the original logo that can be used throughout our website and more. The idea for a ‘bug’ came directly from our users, who said we needed a better way of distinguishing ourselves.
To create the bug, we used the letter W with a green swath of color underneath. When the new site launches, you’ll see this symbol used in a few different ways. You may notice our “W” sprinkled amongst our listings showing all the folks who have become official members of WhitePages (for FREE of course).
You’ll also see the W used as our “favicon” (marked by red arrow below) – a favicon is that little icon thingy that shows up in your browser or your lists of favorites after you have bookmarked our site.
Phew, I know, I was supposed to keep this short…your turn, Isiah, tell our audience about a favorite moment of yours while working on this rebranding project:
Isiah:
Well, since Alexi has covered the development of the logo, let me tell you the fun I had being a part of the new site redesign concept team. Utilizing the same process we used to develop the new identity we ended up with three mock-ups for our new website. What made this different from just skinning our current site with a new color scheme and logo was all our rebranding efforts. We have a new personality and set of attributes we needed our site to reflect. Our personality attributes (friendly, sincere, smart, contemporary, straightforward ,good humored) make up our strategic brand platform that was discussed in the last post. Your brand is based solely on user perception not just your definition. How users interact with our product (WhitePages.com) and feel about those interactions is what we were conceptualizing.
We set out to create the new WhitePages originally with lots of rules and guidelines that we had developed from years of research and listening to our customers. But, all this experience and understanding actually got in the way of our goals to create a contemporary design. So, our first round of mock-ups were decent and met our expectations, but after walking away from the meeting with our design team we actually felt a bit underwhelmed. Keep in mind what we were tasked to create was a concept design, much like those futuristic concept cars you see at auto shows. We immediately informed the design team of our desire to see something that would knock our socks off.
The final round of site mock-ups were incredible, they ranged from 2 steps ahead of the curve to miles away. We presented 3 designs to our executive team and got approval of our mid ranged idea and our totally flying Lamborghini concept. Our new site is a mixture of the best concepts from this exercise. Having our brand personality and pillars as guidelines helped us to step outside of our comfort zone and still create a site that reflected our new brand.
This is a really exciting time for us here at WhitePages and we hope you will enjoy the improvements to our new site and your opportunity to become apart of it all by becoming a member.
Alexi Maczka and Isiah T Sevenly
Other Brand Series Posts:
The Series Introduction: WhitePages Site Redesign
Market Research and Analysis
Strategic Brand Platform
Defining our Visual Identity
Educating Employees on ‘Brand’
Related posts:
