The value of a brand refresh

Our local community is important to us, and we have long admired the Liphook in Bloom team of volunteers for their dedication and hard work in making Liphook look so wonderful with the plant displays around the village. To offer our support to the team, we have re-refreshed the logo for ‘Liphook in Bloom’ and assisted them with the roll out of the new logo across all their marketing and display materials.

This is a classic case of the importance of being flexible in your approach to brands requiring an update. Some brands, it is true, just don’t work for the organisation (they may have done once, but not in every case) and no amount of re-jigging, font changes, layout changes, motif updates and other design tricks, will help improve the situation. That signals a time to draw a line under the old and build a clear brief for the new. This isn’t always the case; sometimes we’re approached by companies who have the essence of a good brand – it just needs some TLC to make it sing.

That was the case with the Liphook in Bloom logo – as a community based scheme, the logo style needed to reflect that. So, we first set about work on trying to improve what was there already to see if this took the logo to the right place. As you can see below we re-created and updated all the elements of the logo (the font, the watering can, the water drops and the flowers), and used a subtle ‘brush stroke’ to frame the letters softly, and finally removed the detail within the letters which we felt was distracting, instead opting for a solid colours in a varied pallette across the lettering.

Carolyn from the Liphook in Bloom team had this to say: “It was a great surprise when Mzuri Design contacted Liphook in Bloom with an offer to refresh our logo and ‘brand’, but it has been a delight to work with them through the various stages.  They have shown great originality and patience, and the final product is wonderful.”

So, the moral of the story? Take a critical look at your logo and see if it is something that can be built on, adapted and updated to more accurately reflect where your business is now, or whether it has had its day and it’s time to start from scratch. If you’re unsure and looking for inspiration, why not contact us to get a copy of our ‘brand identity questionnaire’ – designed to get the creative juices flowing and help you in your decision making process!

Email me for your copy.