branding, visual design
Friendbuy is one of the leading customer referral program companies in the market, being used by high profile clients such as Warby Parker, Classpass, and Dollar Shave Club.
Friendbuy felt that their aesethetic was outdated and wanted to rebrand from the ground up in addition to redesigning their marketing site.
Process
ATTRIBUTES
To get to know who they were and who they wanted to be, I started off with extensive questioning and designed a few exercises for their team to complete.
The post-it exercise started off with the team writing down various characteristics and putting them on the white board. Once we'd done this for about 15 minutes, we started to sort them into Yes and No piles.
From these piles we sorted them into attribute categories and I further narrowed them down into four attributes: driven, youthful, disruptive, engaging.
The other exercises were: a brand dating profile (to see who Friendbuy would be if they were a person) and asking the team to create a visual mood board.
PROJECT
Friendbuy - Branding and Website
Date
Summer - Fall 2016
Client
Friendbuy
Visual Themes
ORGANIC GROWTH
On the team mood board, team members would often pin visual examples of growth/progression in nature. Friendbuy's purpose as a referral program is to allow companies to grow organically through sharing between friends. I really wanted to hone in on this idea of growth and express it visually.
MATHEMATICS / ENGINEERING
Friendbuy is first and foremost an engineering company. Unlike other referral programs run by marketers, their product is able to be directly integrated into the client's site and holds up under the scrutiny of skeptical engineers.
The CEO wanted make sure a sense of technology, intelligence, and expertise was expressed in the visuals, as it was the defining factor that set them apart from their competitors.
To marry these two themes together, I looked into patterns and shapes that corresponded with patterns in math and nature.
Inspiration
Shapes
Looking at my inspiration, I noticed there was a clear pattern in the shapes they expressed. Everything was very geometrical, even the more entropic looking swarm/growth patterns. Here are some patterns that I derived:
FIBONACCI SPIRAL
The first motif I kept coming back to was the Fibonacci spiral. Often seen in nature and mathematics, it was the perfect representation of growth.
SOCIAL NETWORK STRUCTURES
Within the study of sociology and human relationships, there are different ways of mapping how connections form.
Geodesic Grid
This grid is a geodesic sphere flattened out. The curves and shapes that expand across the grid also are reminiscent of the fractals and spirals.
FRACTAL
Another pattern that perfectly represents exponential growth in a structured format.
The client and I ended up picking the geodesic grid pattern because of its flexibility as an element and surface pattern, but also because of how the shapes echoed themes of growth and movement.
Color
The client wanted to stick to a very tech-y, almost futuristic-looking palette. I picked out a cobalt color that leaned toward the cool end of the spectrum and had an almost fluorescent feel to give the palette some vibrancy and edge.
Typography
Because of the company's emphasis on engineering, I wanted to pick something that had a tech-y feeling, but not overly robotic or angular. DIN had the perfect combination of subtle angles in the letters that appeared engineer-like, and a thin weight that kept it light and open.
