Snook rebranding. It’s happening. It’s a big endeavour but it’s exciting!

Where do you start with rebranding Snook?

A company rebrand is always exciting. And daunting. Snook was born 6 years ago and since then, we have grown and changed considerably. This year in particular, we opened a new office in London and continued to build on our work across England. We are also moving our Glasgow headquarters to a larger new office and opening an events space.

With business expanding, we are refining our strategic direction and working on our website to ensure it reflects what Snook has become and our full potential. At this stage, we felt the need for a company rebrand.

The design and development of Snook’s new brand identity is a joint team effort and spreads across the whole offer of Snook, both externally and internally.

A re-brand for us is not top down. As always, it is bottom up and includes our customers and audiences giving their input and feedback into the process.

This journey means we not only cover graphic and digital design but at the same time look at our strategy, service offer and ensure this works alongside our business plan and future aspirations. It involves strategic sessions with Sarah and our team. We’re using their knowledge to reflect on our tools and services, our previous and future work and their input into what will help us move further towards our ideal state as a company.

#OPENSNOOK

Snook’s rebranding started with an #opensnook session in March 2015. We worked on our company as we would with any of our clients. The team focused on identifying our key stakeholders, mapping everyone that interacts with Snook – from clients to workshop participants.

We worked through a branding circle discussing and defining our mission and core values. This exercise helped us clarify our direction as a company.

Approaching our identity rebrand as a team highlighted some of Snook’s core strengths, a sense of shared responsibility, ownership for what we stand for and deliver, personal initiative and positive company culture.

Snook expertise

We also clarified our expertise by dividing our offering into 6 key services:

– Research
– Design
– Strategy
– Delivery
– Build Capacity
– Events

Having all these elements in place helped us structure our thinking to tackle the visual part of our branding and ensure that our direction reflects the complexity and breadth of Snook’s expertise as well as its values and mission.

This influenced the choice of our logo, typefaces, colour palette, patterns and will guide the development of endless Snook’s assets (which we are still in the process of mapping through brainstorming sessions and shared documents).

While working on the new brand, Snook’s designers had to keep some distance. Balance their inside knowledge of the company with views and feedback of the team while mitigating their attachment to Snook and its old/new brand identities.

Time management

Unsurprisingly, one of the main difficulties of an in house rebrand that emerged during this project is time management. Juggling external projects and Snook’s branding, resulted in prioritizing the former and postponing the latter. To overcome this issue, we defined a stricter development strategy and timeline, using Basecamp and Evernote to track to do’s and milestones and Slack for internal communication and brand updates for the wider team.

Once our basic brand is defined, our plan is to use the expertise of the team, having specific team members leading the development of various components of our identity. For example, a grid/layout system for all our documents, and a range of templates suitable for the development of proposals, reports, toolkits, presentations, prototyping, mockups and wireframes.

The new brand

The brand is still a work in progress but we are set on keeping Snook name with its cheeky nature, and keep the red colour which we have used throughout the 6 years we have been in business. We wanted to go for a more modern, slick feel than the original logo; keep our Scottish component which has always been at the heart of the company, but translate it in a more geometric pattern and new colour palette that builds a DNA for all our documents based on the content.

We are very excited to start sharing snippets of our new identity so keep an eye on our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!

A question for you

Meanwhile, we leave you with a question: what new tagline would you give Snook?‪

We welcome your feedback and views so share your thoughts using #opensnook and follow our progress.