Saying hello to the updated Huddle identity and site

Posted by Jaan on September 16th, 2010 | Add your comment

I am very proud of this project, and while I look for my glass of pink champagne to toast with the rest of the team, below is what I wrote on our official Huddle blog today.

The Huddle web site looks a little bit different these days. It’s brighter and lighter. Easier to navigate, yet also familiar. It is still Huddle but more grown up (like the nephew you haven’t seen in a few years).

What you see today is the result of a process that started in May. We decided it was time to take a closer look at the way we presented Huddle to the world. This included our visual design, the text we put on the web site, how the site worked, and at least a dozen other things.

At the heart of it all was our desire to show who we are as a company here and now. Our old profile, site and message were almost three years old and had served us well. However, a lot had happened in those years and it was time to reflect that to the wider world.

The work

We crafted a short brief on what we wanted to achieve based on what our company stands for, and how we want to portray ourselves (clarity and function were frequently mentioned). With that, and a few references to the work of industrial designer Dieter Rams for inspiration, we got to work.

Lots of hard work ensued over many months where we ruthlessly rejected anything that we didn’t feel was up to par. In the end, we arrived at what you see at huddle.com today.

The result

Our updated visual identity is contemporary, without following fickle trends (just like Huddle). It reflects us as the business we are today and the business we want to be tomorrow.

The foundation of our updated profile is strong enough to work everywhere – from the web site through to the web app and our mobile apps, and also in the printed materials we create. It is also flexible enough to allow tweaks and nips and tucks over the coming years (after all things change).

The new Huddle main page, the first use of our new brand identity. Here’s the old site.

We also streamlined the web site’s structure and content to be more useful and clear. Now you get to better information, faster. Our old web site had morphed in to a huge beast, and you – our audience – had showed us which pages and information you found truly useful. Everything else had to go, and it did.

A detail of the “This is Huddle” page from the new site.

More to come

Next we will translate the identity to our web app and the mobile apps, making sure we maintain visual continuity so that our brand is easy to recognize wherever you choose to make us part of your (working) life.

Beyond that there is more to come, but we’ll save that for another post. Thank you for reading.

The project team

Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson – Project sponsorship, strategy
Jaan Orvet – Creative direction, concept, UX
Hudson Maul – Art direction, design, code
Nopadon Wongpakdee – Project management
Liz Adams – Copy
Daniel Rajendran – Code
Lucy Wimmer, Ashleigh Casner – Additional copy and proofing
Martin Eriksson – Reality checker