If you love a blooper, or you find looking at rejected brand concepts interesting, I thought I’d share some brand takes that saw the cutting room floor on our last project.
It’s easy to look at a finished website or logo and think, “Well, that looks easy!” But really, re-branding a company takes a lot of testing, ideation, and going down the wrong road before you find the right fit. As a practice, I think it’d be great if more of us shared rejected concepts- it helps to the see the process!
THE ORIGINAL BRAND:
This logo came from merging two companies’ logos together: Freeing Returns and Lillii R&B. While there were elements the team liked, the colors weren’t working at all together, and the font felt tired.
CONCEPT 1: A NEW DAWN
We kept a lot of the same elements of the original brand here, but swapped the pink for a fiery orange and the blue for a serene green. We used peek-a-boo circles to demonstrate how Freeing Returns is able to find money hiding in company data and processes.
CONCEPT 2: COMPUTER WORLD
This classic green-screen approach reflected the underlying technology that powers Freeing Returns. A super futuristic font rounded out the tech-forward design.
CONCEPT 3: MS. ROBBINS RETURNS
We updated the original logo’s pink here, tempered again with a few greens and an off-white. The impact was a funky, edgy approach to communicating this tech company’s results.
CONCEPT 4: SHAPING THE FUTURE
This one was definitely the most “out there” one: but we still loved it. Modern retro, feminine, and totally unexpected within the tech industry- just like Freeing Returns’ founder, Barbara Jones.
THE WINNER: UPWARD COAST
The client ended up going with this concept: it was a fresh take on their current logo, with the addition of dots as data points that reflect the Freeing Returns business of data mining and optimization. The FR monogram added another level of sophistication and variety to their logo use.
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