Due to a new strategic orientation of the New Work Group and its brands – XING, onlyfy, and kununu – I was given the task of revisiting the visual identity of the 20 year company to better reflect it.
Role: Strategy Design Roll-out
Approach
Initially several different creative routes were explored in the form of logos and mood-boards. Some of those were more disruptive while others were more aligned with the status-quo, but since the status-quo had not been introduced so long ago, we aligned and agreed that an evolutionary step made much more sense than a disruptive one. Following that decision, the focus of the creative process become exploring solutions that also retain some level of familiarity. That meant keeping the Plectrum, a core element of the New Work Group brand, as well as a similar colour palette.
Although an abstract symbol, for the company, the Plectrum and its three sides represents the three elements at the core of the brand: individual fulfilment, work-life quality, and company success. Ultimately, we decided to add a circle expanding from the centre of the Plectrum to symbolise our products and services that revolve around it. A new unified story – a rich offer built around a common core, our world of work.
Besides a new corporate font (New Work Sans) and an updated colour palette, a key element from the new corporate design is the pattern element made of lines representing data - a key foundation of our products that make use of data to enable companies and individuals to find better professional matches. All of these changes also gave us an opportunity to redesign all touch-points, digital and physical, from websites and social media, to printed documents and signage, across all of our offices.
Outcome
This rebranding project has been a recent personal highlight. With a small team of two, we managed to pull this project off. We aligned with several stakeholders, obtained management approval, and efficiently oversaw various teams, streams, and offices across different mediums including print, digital, signage. The project received overwhelmingly positive feedback internally and was also positively covered by prominent German specialized press such as Page Online and Designtagesbuch.