Over the past thirteen years, I’ve witnessed and been apart of LexBlog maturing from a startup with a few employees to a highly functioning company with an established vision to improve legal services by bridging the gap between consumers and legal professionals.
Over this same time span, our band has changed and matured as well. That said, it has not been a clean transition. With each revision of our logo, legacy elements have lingered and over time turned into quite a mess. At one point there were three logotypes in use and within those variations of each. So we also had a consistency problem.
The longer we let this go, the deeper into brand spaghetti we fell. I can still feel the cringe of shame and irritation as I saw these different logos in use. We even adopted names for each: Candy Bar, Square L, and Circle L. Internally we were joking about using a trapezoid or triangle for our next go-around. It was that bad.
As with all projects at LexBlog, there must be order and process involved. We use a ticketing system and sprint meetings to outline what we will be working on, the effort required, and the desired outcome.
In this instanced it looked something like this:
As LexBlog we would like uniform branding across all web,
email, support properties, and marketing.
This single sentence was no small task. We began by tracking and documenting our logo usage. Where it was located, which logo, and what revised mark we would implement (we now have two). As an aside, we agreed that the circle “L” icon (as we called it) would become our logo mark to rule all others. The circle logo was recognizable, simple, and worked well from mobile to desktop. From a marketing standpoint, it allows us to apply unique and powerful messaging alongside. Which will be critical in the coming months as we communicate our core values and beliefs to the legal community we serve.
In parallel with the documentation process was a much-needed refinement of our logo. From kerning the letters to defining the spacing between logo mark and text nothing was left out. Even the favicon was refined to ensure the best possible clarity. Once complete, the logo sets were stored in a central repository so that our entire team could access.
The final step, to implement the new logo mark everywhere using the spreadsheet created earlier as a guide to lead us to the finish. Only a few obstacles remain, but we are well on our way out of brand spaghetti.