How we designed a visual identity to bring our new brand to life

In the previous article in this series, I shared the process we went through in selecting our new name. Choosing a name, though, was really just the beginning. We also needed a story and visual narrative to flesh out our new name and bring depth to our new identity.

Perhaps even more importantly, we needed to turn to all the research, insight, and time that went into crafting our new brand, to make sure that the story and visual narrative differentiated in the market, and really had the ‘wow’ factor to make us unforgettable.

We knew that this was the only way to make sure that the brand would help us retain our strong leadership position in the market, while promoting the company’s reputation as an innovative, dynamic, and cutting-edge player.

The process of developing our visual identity was a combination of our incredible in-house design studio who were involved from day one until today, and Re, our partner in developing the brand’s expression.

Where to begin?

We started the creative process by looking at our competitors: how they position themselves, what colors they use, the imagery, their style, and more.

Differentiation comes from understanding what is special and distinctive about your brand that others can’t claim. We definitely learned a lot.

First, most of our competitors had selected blue as their brand color, followed by black, red, and green. With many of the primary colors already taken, we knew that color selection presented an opportunity for us to break the mold and to stand out from the crowd.

Secondly, we discovered that many other brands were lacking a strong, clearly defined idea behind their visual identity. Here we saw an opportunity to infuse our brand with meaning, vision, and a clear concept that communicates who Cognyte is and the value we bring.?

Connecting who we are to how we look

To understand our new look and feel, it’s important to understand what Cognyte does. Our open software fuses, analyzes, and visualizes disparate data sets at scale to help security organizations find the needles in the haystacks. We needed this to be clearly visible in our new look and feel.

We needed our new visual language to articulate the connection of these different data sets, and to show how we generate insights and provide actionable intelligence.

Our new look highlights this value that our technology brings – literally connecting dots and uncovering the needles in the proverbial haystacks.

Working with the right agency to bring the brand to life

A key part of this process was our partnership with Re, the global branding and design agency in London that helped us shape our brand. We worked hand-in-hand to select the name, define the narrative and design the visual story.

As part of our internal brand launch (more on that in the next blog!), Darren Bowles, partner and Executive Creative Director at the agency, shared how we developed the brand together. Take a couple of minutes to check out a discussion between us on the process of creating the visual brand, in Re’s recent blog.

Bringing the graphic language to life

Our graphic language is a visualization of diving deeper and wider, just like what our software does. Each visual connection point offers a new opportunity to discover new insights. We use different shapes within the language that add variety, depth, and visual richness.

To further underscore our uniqueness, we selected the futuristic freshness of a ‘proactive purple,’ which we combined with the solidity of a ‘deep purple.’ This combination captures the tension between being cutting edge and mature at the same time, a force that sits at the heart of our business and makes Cognyte so unique.?This is new color is what we call blurple!

And the way we ensured that we differentiated both the verbal and visual representations of our brand is through an innovative logo approach, a new color palette that is unique in our industry, and avoiding predictable messaging frameworks.

Are colors and shapes enough?

Once we nailed the name, color, and look and feel, we needed motion and art direction to breathe life into our brand.

To represent the context of the insights that our technology solutions deliver, we selected images that tell a story and represent familiar scenarios in the security analytics world.

To show software and technology, we use abstract representations, with a focus on light, patterns, and architecture.

And we made a concerted effort to include as many people as possible in our photography. After all, our strength comes from the amazing people at Cognyte, who are the driving force behind our cutting-edge technology.

You can see this in the execution of our brand, which includes many different people, photographed in natural settings, and which uses isometric angles and a central focal point to hero them.?

Is our work done?

No, our work is not done. But we have made great progress and I am proud to see our brand immersed in every corner of our physical space, as well as on social media, and across digital channels.

It is now over a year since this process began. And we have achieved many accomplishments. We have literally surrounded ourselves with the brand, ‘Cognytizing’ our offices, our collateral, and our products. It was fascinating to see how quickly our employees identified with the new name and began to use it naturally.

However, a brand is not something that one ever ‘completes.’ It is something that evolves together with the organization, and improves as we learn what works, what drives our business goals, and also what may be less effective.

And you can see this development on our social networks – on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. To check it all out I invite you to visit our website and to follow us on social media to see how the brand and visuals continue to evolve.