Rebranding: a napkin notes?story

I’ve been working on Zappi’s rebrand for the past few months and it’s been a truly collaborative experience; our internal creative team and Blue State Digital (a talented external agency) worked side by side to deliver the strategic and creative rationale for better displaying the power of our technology and its impact on the industry.

As part of the process, I challenged myself to find a simple method for listening to and contextualizing feedback from our team, board, and partners. I also needed to combine this with perspectives on Why the project was necessary; What level of effort it would take to meet our aspirations; and How our Freudian archetypes will be aligned.

Due to the project’s scale and complexity, injecting simplicity wherever possible was crucial. One method that proved useful was to distill key strategic elements into... cocktail napkin sketches.

So for Why we started this:

For What level of effort:

For How our Freudian archetypes will be aligned:

I found that to visualize complex or emotionally charged ideas helped our teams translate them further: into simple, straight-forward, cohesive brand messaging.

It’s never easy to simplify complexity, but it’s been worth it. Try it; these napkins were the start of what made it possible to provide clarity during the brand’s internal relaunch.

And we are very excited to reveal our new identity publicly in the coming months…