What’s black, white and red all over?

A newspaper? A Penguin rolling down a rocky cliff? No, actually it’s our new look for 2017. Our Brand Refresh.

We’re lucky at Red Fred to be in demand. The work we do for our clients has always been the best advert for our services. We always receive good comments which often lead to meaningful referrals. The only downside of being busy is not being able to find as much time as we’d like to work on the Red Fred Branding. We always practice what we preach, but sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day.

It was our resolution this year to ensure that we dedicated enough time to develop our own branding. What you’re seeing is the result of that New Year’s resolution. We’ve redesigned our website, produced a new brochure and also have a series of posters which are displayed outside our office. We’re really happy with our new look. Aweek after launching, the feedback we’ve received has been incredibly positive.

A Brand Refresh – why change?

Why not? It’s like changing your hairstyle or clothing, it’s nice to have a change. A brand refresh can reinvigorate a business, it can help communicate a change of direction, it can help bring you to people’s attention.

Over of history we’ve refreshed a number of different brands. From Elliott, a leading company in modular buildings, to Rose Farm, a local authentic farmshop who sell their own meat produce on site.

In each case we looked at where the business was in terms of recognition, and discussed where they want to be. Sometimes it may result in very subtle changes, such as colour or typeface. In other cases it could result in a complete rebrand, each case is different. That’s one of the things that Red Fred pride ourselves on, our ability to look at each client as an individual and cater to their very specific requirements.

We put the red in Fred.

When addressing our own communication we wanted to try and convey style, intelligence but with a sense of humour. Red is part of our name (a story for another blog) and we felt that we should incorporate more red into our branding. It’s a very striking colour, and though sometimes associated with danger, we prefer to think of it as vital, energetic and powerful.

As designers, we are all keen on clean and bold typography – drawing from influences such as Peter Saville and Neville Brody, so we wanted to allow the type to shine out with simple, bold statements. In order not to make the design too cluttered, we’ve retained our simple complementary colour palette of black, white and a range of cool grey colours.

In terms of imagery, to continue the clean simplicity, we’ve chosen a range of images which are obliquely related to the subject we’re writing about. For instance, where we discuss brand strategy, we’ve used an image of a vintage synthesiser. The relation with the synthesiser is, as with brand strategy, it has many variables which have to be adjusted to get things “just right”.

Stay tuned

We have lots of plans for using our new brand identity throughout the year stay tuned on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for to stay up-to-date with what we’re up to.

ALWAYS TRY TO FIND TIME FOR YOURSELF