The hardest client to rebrand: yourself


They say that the hardest client you’ll ever work with is yourself. It turns out that they were totally right.

We’ve written before about how we’ve recently been re-evaluating ourselves as a business, so us designer-types thought it would also be a great opportunity to also give the Tall brand a refresh.

As part of our own re-branding, the sessions that we’ve done have been challenging but really insightful. Analysing what you like about yourself is great, but acknowledging your own weaknesses can be a bitter pill to swallow. We’re professionals however and we’ve been clear that we want to approach this like we would any client. Remove the ego, one large spoonful of optimism and spike it with a dose of curiosity. We’re back on track.

The Tall brand had pretty much developed quite organically over the years. Other than a logo, typeface and some black & white, we were putting all our creative focus into making our client work do the talking. The Tall brand had a somewhat ‘effortlessly stylish’ appeal to it that has received many positive comments from our clients and peers over the years. Fast forward a few years and not a lot has changed. It’s great that our work continues to be the first compliment we receive when talking to new people so we’re conscious that the direction in which we evolve our brand doesn’t want to muscle that out of the limelight too much.

Our designers have been visibly agitated to get stuck into the exciting world of colours, typefaces and graphic devices, but we know from the success we’ve had with branding for our clients that defining our core personality principles is fundamental to creating a great brand identity.

It’s been nice to take another look at ourselves in 2020 and realise that our core values as a company pretty much just reflect who we are as people. We’ve never been about flamboyance – we save that energy for our clients and we’re certainly not the types to try and use big, fancy words to impress people.

In many ways it’s about simplicity. And that’s one of our core principles. It’s always been there, but now we can actually think about how that can be a core thread throughout our own brand to inform and inspire the way we speak, our messaging, processes and the interactions with our clients, partners, colleagues and friends.

And now we’re starting to look at how that can inspire our visual brand. But we’ll come onto that later.

Wait, was that a different typeface in the header graphic?

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