Details
Client
Contact is a full stack B2B solution to discover, manage, book and pay creative talent instantly.
Challenges
I was brought in to capture the essence of Contact's supportive ethos, which was focussing on supporting both talent and agencies within the industry. I had to reflect our softer and more caring message, whilst still maintiaining a stylish 'edge' given our position in the creative (more specifically, fashion and ecommerce) industry that wouldn't alienate our creatives. At this point, the company was also pivoting towards prioritising bookings and payments over discovery of stylish new talent, and with a small team of developers I had to take into account resources available to roll out the refit.
Futureproof and scalable
Goal
Contact had quite an established brand, with a unique style throughout their entire design system. They not only needed a striking new wordmark and logo, but more polished colour scheme, UI, type, and marketing assets.
Usability over edginess
Approach
The approach began with user research. I spoke with creatives, agents and bookers to get an idea of what was wrong with Contact's messaging. Initial findings in user research and interviews was the the existing brand was 'loud'. Users felt intimidated by our use of all caps, bold colours and striking imagery. They also found that our mark was confusing. Intended to be a polaroid to reflect Contact's modelling talent; it's ambiguity in our expanding creative catalogue left us a bit caged. From this point, I could begin sketching inital ideas for the wordmark and accompanying typeface, and the UI would look after itself. With our pivot towards being a scalable platform for creatives and bookers alike, I wanted to ease up on the contemporary 'edge' the old designs had and prioritised accessibility and usability. The quality of our imagery spoke for itself, and so I ensured images could breath in their own 'canvas', and kept UI components clean and readable. Colours needed polishing to conform to accessiblity standards, and type needed to be easily scannable. The mark itself came about from the company's name, a smooth and continous link, connecting user's with bookers, whilst avoiding anything too modern or 'B2B-y'.
Conclusion
Contact's core messaging didn't require a complete refit after my initial findings from users. It needed refining and condensing into a futureproof, well-scrubbed set of guidelines with a theme that felt more in-touch with our goals. The design system I created for the rebrand also kept scope to a manageable level for our small dev team. Feedback from users reflected the rebrands success in my goals.
