Solution

Audit what was working, update and enhance what wasn't.

The Evolved leadership team came to me with a large, ambitious ask: "What can we do to liven up the brand?". While this question felt exciting and open-ended, it also automatically spawned a whole other set of follow up questions that made the task so much more complex. One question most notably being: "Well, what IS working for your brand?".

Only from that initial discovery and reflection on the brand in its current state, then did we have a lay of the land to build tactics from. We landed on a few areas to work on:

Brand Refresh

Evolving the brand.

There were hallmarks of the original brand that had helped the company gain their recognition. The notable peach and orange hues paired with the negative space logomark had built the brand's equity and were agreed that they shouldn't be touched, but rather worked around. However, almost everything else was free game to be on the chopping block if we found it wasn't carrying its weight.

The brand was stuck in perpetual "dark mode" with most of it's color palette based and utilized over darker backgrounds. One of the goals set out was to create a more universal brand palette, with corresponding sub styles based on the audience being spoken to at that given time. The result was a vibrant harmonious family of 5 colors that could work across both light and dark modes, with distinct sub palettes for brand and talent audience groupings.

All three areas of development were worked on in conjunction with each other. The website updates would inform the business-dev materials, and those updates would inform how to update the brand even more. A cycle of quick, iterative development led to reshaping the look and feel of the brand as a whole. Some areas pushed the boundaries of how the brand approached certain elements. This iterative and judacious approach resulted in a update to the Evolved logo and then shortly thereafter, their own brand typeface!

Website

A two-phased approach.

While working through the brand refresh, the Evolved site needed an update as well. The current site was a one-pager that gave viewers a high-level idea of what the business did and who they worked with. It did a great job for the time it was live, but it had grown out of its shell. Evolved had grown immensely both through talent representation, as well as through large scale brand partnerships and activations. It was paramount that the new website gave viewers the most information possible about what Evolved is capable of, based on which audience segment they were. ‍

The site updates were split into two phases: an initial landing page update, and a fully-fledged multi-page website showing everything Evolved has to offer.

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Initial phase: Update the existing landing page

The initial update also served as a crucial medium to stress test the brand refresh. The seeds of the second phase's plans were planted then, and through further experimentation and output, did the original concepts begin to bloom the more the brand was built upon.

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The fast-follow phase: Fully-fledged, multi-page website

The second phase of the site included a full rework of content hierarchy based on Kyle's knowledge of working in and with agencies. This phase leaned heavily on the prior accomplishments of Evolved's team through the addition of case studies and brand & talent specific segmentation. Information had to be agnostic enough to tout what had been done, but specific enough to entice and convince the user that Evolved can in deed "walk the walk".

Business Development Materials

Business doesn't stop because your brand did.

Alongside the initial website update, business materials needed to be brought up to date to ensure a clear continuity of the brand is experienced from first impression to signing with the agency. The prior presentations were fragmented between a handful of templates that were crafted and sporadically updated throughout the years. Pair that with a sales and business development team that needs to move, and you have a recipe for hodge-podge decks.

The goal here was to help standardize the presentations with the new look and feel. Anyone on the team should be able to create a presentation and have it feel cohesive while retaining the ability to curate for their needs. Not every presentation and lead are the same, so the design system and presentation formatting needed to allow and support that ebb and flow across multiple team members at various experience levels.

The result was a comprehensive "base" presentation template for all things Evolved. Once that template was established, curated and customized pieces for specific use cases such as pitch decks and account reporting templates were then created from it.