Refreshing Unthinkable's identity

Unthinkable has been in business since 2010 helping our clients solve tricky problems and do great things with digital. Our original brand lasted us five years. I still feel affection for it, but it reflected an earlier phase in our life as a company before we definitively decided we wanted to carry on leaning into delivery in all its forms, be it design, product development, content production. So five years into trading, the ‘Consulting’ had to go, and with it the rather bookish brand feel.

In 2015, the very talented Paul Finn created a new brand and logo for us. That logo has stood the test of time and you can still see it on this page today.

Along with the logo, Paul created an ingenious and whimsical identity system for us based on the idea of the popular nineteenth-century puzzle / design tool, the tangram. This was intended to symbolise both that no two projects were alike, and the pleasure we take in solving problems and piecing things together for our clients.

We also really enjoyed working with these assets - it felt like we were playing with a kind of very cerebral abstract toy box. But time goes by, and the last couple of years in particular have been a time of huge growth and change for us as a company and a team, so we felt the time was right for a change to our look and feel. We wanted to better reflect the dynamic and hugely collaborative company that Unthinkable has become, and to do that we were keen to draw on the visual and content design talents of some of our newer team members. So we asked a few members of our team to apply their creative skills to the task of visualising the current and future state of our own company. Central to this project were Hannah Mason, who combined UX design and front-end skills, graphic designer Ella Zeki and writer Eleanor Herzog.

First, we played with our logo a bit.

But decided that we actually really like the boldness and solidity of what we have and that the existing logo would be our visual anchor as we changed everything around it. We explored a range of options for colour palette, type and imagery.

And eventually we landed on the visual design system that we’ve been using for the past few articles we’ve published here on LinkedIn. Central to the system is the idea of using the squiggle (technical term) to represent the fluidity of our processes and the joy of unexpected directions. We also invited some of our associates to create individual squiggles (some of which we later incorporated into the way we display people's images on our website).

In parallel, we’ve been exploring approaches to content. Alongside the layout and formatting, Eleanor has been working with us to distil the essence of Unthinkable into some choice wording — no mean feat, as Eleanor was not only interpreting the ramblings of Unthinkable's directors but also crowd-sourcing words and ideas from our wider team of associates.

And finally we began to pull all of this thinking together into a new website and a new suite of document templates. We wanted the accent to be on simplicity, and not just on who we are and what we do, but most importantly what we can do for and with our brilliant clients.

I’m pleased to say that we launched the website earlier this month, and wanted to say a big thank you to Hannah and Ella for the creativity, playfulness and flair they brought to developing the new visual design system, to Eleanor for her thoughtfulness and patience in helping distil the essence of Unthinkable down to a few very well chosen and well placed words and also to Hannah for her tenacity in wrestling with Squarespace to turn it all into working code.