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About the company
EchoUser is a user experience design agency specializing in user research, interaction and visual design.
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Role
Brand identity, visual design, front-end web development
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Timeline
Dec. 2013 to Feb. 2015
Context
EchoUser has experienced a series of rebranding internally and externally since mid-2013. The goal was to revamp our old identity into something more modern that reflects EchoUser’s evolving traits, which are bold, adventurous and exploratory. Starting with the logo, color palette and typography, the branding efforts gradually spreaded to the the whole team, with each designer focusing on his/her area of specialty.
I was honored to be in charge of the design of our web banner ads, lobby canvases, and quarterly newsletters in the past year.
EchoUser's old identity
The inspirations: EchoUser's new logo and color palette
Web banner ads
I explored concepts revolving around 3 themes:
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The straightforward theme: who EchoUser is and what EchoUser does.
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The adventurous theme: using the analogy of extreme sports to demonstrate our bold and exploratory spirit.
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Emphasizing on EchoUser’s strength, which is the ability to solve complex problems with simple solutions.
Each concept was also made into three different proportions to show how they could fit into real web pages.
8 ad concepts for 3 banner sizes
Lobby canvases
The canvases were designed for EchoUser to showcase our design case studies as office decorations. Thus, when clients or participants visited, they could get a better sense of our business while waiting in the lobby area. The portable canvases could also be handy as background decorations when we set up stands at networking events.
Concept exploration
Final concept
Newsletter
I designed and coded the newsletter template within Mailchimp. I aimed to provide a clear, modular information structure that fits both potential and existing clients’ needs.
Newsletter template design
Mailchimp development environment
Reflection
As the branding quote by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, goes, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” It’s hard to assess how successful a rebranding effort is by simply asking people how they think about it. Thus, it takes months, even years, to see the effects that might gradually impact the business.
So far what I’ve seen and heard is generally positive. EchoUser was able to get more diverse projects, and client/interview candidates don’t perceive us simply as a UX research firm anymore (which is where we were rooted), but instead as a full-stack research and design agency. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new identity will take us!