Organisations change, grow and mature just like people do, and a corporate brand should evolve alongside the company itself. As industries change and focus shifts, a company’s visual identity should be reviewed and refreshed to retain alignment with the organisation’s positioning, audience and core values.
Existing in a growing industry, Carbon Market Institute needed to bring their brand into the modern age to not just keep up with, but surpass their competitors. After an in-depth industry, competitor and target market analysis, we identified that CMI’s brand needed to better communicate solidity and reassurance. Developing a more type-based brandmark, introducing a stronger, more high-contrast colour palette, and giving the overall brand a more clean and contemporary look and feel repositioned CMI as a respectable and sophisticated organisation that bridged the gap between corporate and green interests.
Retaining the bones of the existing logo and re-skinning it by updating its font, adjusting its colours and revising its graphic treatments ensured that it would still be recognisable to CMI’s existing audience, but meet the requirements that it needed to in order to feel contemporary and refreshed. Wanting to avoid cliches and looking overly environmental in feel, we ditched the typical green fields and windmill shots and focused on rich emotive textures instead, contrasting these in greyscale against slabs of the new CMI green and yellow corporate colours.
The combination of these graphic elements provided a toolbox of visuals which can be reinterpreted again and again, allowing the brand to feel dynamic and continue to evolve. This approach also allows the brand to be flexible, and can adapt fluidly to a range of applications. We rolled CMI’s new branding out across stationery, marketing collateral, environmental graphics and banners, and prepared an in-depth style guidelines document to explain and protect the use of the CMI brand refresh for years to come.
