A safe pair of hands

Brand identities are usually born in a traditional environment. Interactive and digital touch points are often forgotten about in these early stages.

For huge brands like EE, the biggest shop window is their website; it’s the first place that customers visit when seeking a product or service.

At any one time, these big brands will have multiple agencies delivering multiple projects. In EE’s case, this eventually led to brand dilution – when it should have been brand evolution.

EE tasked us with resetting, updating and future proofing their brand identity through a digital-first lens. In doing so, we helped smooth the relationship between brand and digital as well as create a more cohesive and interactive offering for EE.

We went back to the beginning and began by reassessing the basics in design, like typography hierarchy, colour and grids. We needed brand and digital to understand the shared responsibility and impact of collaborating at this level.

The complex nature of unpicking and rebuilding a brand called for a close, collaborative effort. EE’s Head of Design and Head of Digital Content & Customer Experience spent 3 days a week working at the heart of Dare’s EE team.

Having rebuilt their visual identity, we moved immediately onto solidifying EE’s Global Experience Language.

The process involved reviewing EE’s entire module library (we lost count at 550) to understand what could be recycled, what could be repurposed and what was neither use nor ornament. Armed with a somewhat streamlined library we were able to roll out the new brand.

It was an exhaustive process, and one that required a near fanatical attention to detail. Taking the exploded view, we developed a system that would automate much brand guardianship. We used the guidelines to lock down usage rules. Each module came with a list of complementary (and forbidden) module combinations and its most effective position in the page hierarchy.

Having gotten that far, we decided to go all in and create a robust set of motion guidelines to indicate to the developers how the modules should animate on page load.

We’re pleased to say that there is now consistency throughout the business. And Dare continues to work side by side with EE as guardians of their brand.