Behind the scenes of the Egencia global identity
What began as a small startup inside of Microsoft in the ’90s, Egencia had become the fourth largest travel management company in the world. For the past 25 years, the business had been hard at work growing the business. Throughout its growth, change, and acquisitions, the brand’s identity had crept to center instead of differentiating. The identity was a remix of the companies we had acquired: logos, colors, visual systems, all borrowed from dead brands.
The Egencia brand is more than 7 letters and a bird, technology and travel, or service and experience. It’s a great story about technological modernity, seamlessness with the world’s biggest travel systems and suppliers, and support that scales across languages, cultures, and borders. All of this, within the context of an increasingly device-centric world where travelers and arrangers expect ease and efficiency at their desk as well as on the go. Our brand was responsible for delivering those values to over 8 million people a day, across the entire globe. Our identity needed to reflect that story, but it didn’t.
You could find various brand artifacts in any given office adding to the confusion. Business cards, letterhead, and envelopes sported a blend of logos old and new. Varying shades of brand colors old and new could be found in the wild: old oranges, new oranges, old yellows, new yellows, brown-oranges, brown-yellows—all shades of autumn.
Some of our materials had at times been co-branded, alluding to those curious periods where a brand is in transition. We even found several boxes of letterhead from over 10 years ago in the mailroom. Someone, somewhere, was still sending this stuff out.
The design team took stock of our brand orphans: we had an identity crisis. In its latest form, a hybrid of several mergers and acquisitions, we had reached the logical endpoint of this brand remix. We knew we could improve how we expressed our brand, both in the words we use, as well as our visual identity.
Organizing the work
We didn’t have an in-house brand design team at the time, so there wasn’t anyone dedicated to tackling these kinds of problem. We would have to incubate this change on the Product Design team, and while we had the skills on the team, the trick would be how to create the time to work on such an extensive project.
That was the pitch going into our yearly design-a-thon event. Seven pitches were presented on kick-off day, and this brand design work ended up on the shortlist of projects designers signed up to work on. For the rest of the week, we executed a 5-day sprint to push the work through. Here’s where we got to, how we got there, and how we positioned the brand for the changes that tomorrow would bring.
We started by setting our respective goals and plans for the week, agreeing we would work as all-encompassing as possible. To outline the work, we did individual card sorts of possible topic areas, followed by group de-duplication and renaming. Once we were agreed on the cards and topics we wanted to address, we wrote new stickies for uniformity. From basic logo technical art to long-term brand management, the scope of the week was going to be very broad, and we needed to divide and conquer.
There were 3 designers who signed onto the project, each one leading either Identity Design, Brand Applications, or Change Management. Some clarity on the different roles and responsibilities:
- Identity Design was comprised of defining the basics of color, type, logo artwork, and other fundamentals of brand identity. There’s a lot of responsibility sitting with this person, as they are the sole synthesizer of information. They must be capable of zooming all the way out to building block decisions of typography and proximity, and equally master technical details, such as typography customizations, and baking in appropriate elevations of flexibility into the identity system.
- The Brand Application designer was responsible for not only creating visuals to show how the new brand would look “in the wild,” but was specifically concerned with testing each pass of identity updates through in-product contextual treatments. For example, when a new version of the logo artwork, or new colors, were rendered, this designer would then test those assets throughout the mobile app and desktop experience in either our product comps, or by quickly testing them into our HTML/CSS user interface toolkit (UITK) library.
- The Change Management designer was responsible for making the transition as smooth as possible for everyone, not just the design team. They created a Trello board, and a workflow therein, for managing change requests to brand, or requests for updated sales or marketing materials. This person also defined how and where we would manage our new design assets, as well as how we would stage assets for external partner access. Finally, they drafted all of our initial communications around the project including updates to internal stakeholders, as well as all roll out announcements.
IDENTITY DESIGN
Typography & Logotype
One of the fundamental issues of our identity was that our typography wasn’t optimized to play nice with the modern web, which went against some of our brand attributes, such as being technology-centric. Our old brand identity used three different fonts, all of which would require webfont licensing if we were going to use them correctly (legally) on the web. Costs would double into the mid-10s of thousands if we wanted to use them in our native applications too. Since we were already using Roboto in our web apps, we quickly pulled together some exploration of our logotype set in Roboto.
We liked how it looked: it felt more modern, was more legible, and scaled nicely across print and digital. We also appreciated how Roboto created a subtle connection in and outside of our product. We also could not ignore the efficiency it would create in our type system to have a single brand font, regardless of application type. After taking stock of these immediate benefits, we locked onto Roboto, and started a deeper dive into its characters. To use Roboto, we needed to make it our own.
We wanted the logotype to stand apart from regular typeset version of the wordmark, so we rounded the terminals on all of the characters to soften things up. We didn’t want to leave all of our brand heritage behind, so we carried over the signature swoosh in the capital ‘A’ that had been there for years.
Symbology
Our logo symbol, affectionately personified internally as “Chirpy”—is one of the most core and consistent elements of our mark: dating back to version one, it’s where our yellow accent color lives, and where we see the most motion and activity in forms. We needed to address some technical artwork issues that the logo had inherited over the years. The curves seemed auto-traced. The proportions were wrong: so badly balanced that no matter how you placed it in a design, it was always off-center, ready to tip over any moment.
We updated the base artwork of the symbol, adjusting scale and proportions to re-balance it. The curves of the bird symbol were reworked to be more uniform, and to match the softness in the logotype.
Color
Along the way we were flipping through Pantone books having discussions about color, but the core question was really, “Do we look at new colors, or do we stay close to what we have?”
We live in an era punctuated by nostalgia. Everyone’s looking for it, all the time, and companies are making entire businesses out of selling our childhoods back to us. With our new colors, we wanted that hometown feeling. Like when you return after being away for years, we wanted people to see the new colors as completely refreshed, but still recognizable as uniquely Egencia.
Our new primary yellow is a signifier of travel, taken from the wayfinding signage you can spot within transportation centers across the world. It’s familial to our old palette, but entirely new, and a lot brighter. We ditched the browns and grey primary colors and moved to a rich, deep slate. Our slate contrasts nicely with our yellow, creating a unique color system in our market that no one else was claiming ownership of.
Overall, we’re really pleased with how all of the individual aspects of our identity design have coalesced into one coherent identity. Our logo represents the future of Egencia, and will be instrumental in ushering our brand through the continued growth ahead. You can also dive deeper into the mechanics of our identity design system in our online Brand Center.
BRAND APPLICATION
We won’t go too deep here since this is the area people are most familiar with. How a logo plays out on a t-shirt, or in a trade show booth, isn’t pulp fiction. In fact, a lot of the assets typically created in this phase are speculative. Seeing the logo in use, even speculatively though, does help validate a concept, so you shouldn’t ever skip this work.
One thing that was particularly useful about this phase was that we uncovered a lot of helpful insights on how to design a logo to fit an existing product. Each iteration of change to the logo’s type, color, or shape was placed into product context as it was rendered.
How a logo mixes within a UI, and how it exists alongside aesthetics of iconography, typographic hierarchies, and various shades of color cannot be ignored. These exercises helped us make decisions around when and where to use certain variants, and the best adjustments for different scales.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Right behind this project, the floodgate of requests opened. We created a bit of a frisson internally, and teams were excited to put the new assets to work.
Communications
At the conclusion of the design-a-thon, we invited the executive team to a show and tell event to see the output from the week. They appreciated all of the ideas, but were particularly drawn to the rebrand work. We discussed the drivers for pitching the work, and some of the goals we thought we could accomplish by aligning under an enhanced identity. With lots of discussion and debate, we eventually won their approval to formalize the work, and begin releasing it to the company. Our change management designer made the rollout easier by serving as central point of contact for all inbound feedback. They sent early warning comms that the new brand was coming, partnered with others around the company to hold discussion groups and solicit important input from around the business. They were point person for sending all announcement emails, served as point of contact for the new Brand Center, and sent quarterly updates to key stakeholders about major updates to brand that would follow.
Process
A lot of the process agreements we defined in our design-a-thon remain in place today. We eventually started an in-house Studio team and have since transitioned the management of brand identity to this team. The team has taken the foundations and built upon them over time, which has enabled more rapid generation of tier-1 brand work as well as for work that is more systematized, more templated in nature.
Asset Management
We went back and forth about printed vs. digital in the beginning. “If we print out gorgeous brand manuals, and do a big desk drop, people are going to salivate, right?” Wrong. We ran a small test: we designed minified versions of a new manual, printed about 100 copies, and did a quick desk drop in our Seattle office. We waited a few days for some feedback to roll in. We waited another a week. After 2 weeks, it was clear no one was falling over themselves to get the new manual. The harsh reality was that most people weren’t going to have the wherewithal for design nuance. So PPTs and PDFs weren’t going to work.
We started looking for hosted options online. There’s a lot of tools out there, but very few we felt had strong UX or that demonstrated they were making any material updates to their product over time. We wanted a product that would last, that would be evolved by its product team. We wanted someone as invested in their product as we were in our rebrand.
Frontify resonated for us: as we were building out assets for our Brand Center we were watching Frontify and would see the UI or UX of their product actively changing. They were doing a lot of A/B testing to their product, which mirrored our own product beliefs, and assured us they would be around for as long as we needed them.
It was also a good fit because we needed to set it up quickly, with minimal design and development, but could still be customized as our own. This is where Frontify came in to solve a lot of our problems. We didn’t need file versioning or complex file naming systems, we just needed something that worked for the average employee.
Even still, this wasn’t good enough for most employees. While it was important to document and be able to have governing standards for identity, most people just needed a few logo files, a PPT template, and some of the basic rules.
So we did just that, and created a Quick Start .zip file that includes large PNG logo files for light and dark backgrounds, a handful of photos from our recent photoshoot, the font files, and our global PPT template.
The Brand Center has become the single source of truth for finding and downloading Egencia’s global brand assets. It’s made centralization and distribution of files so much easier, which has been a boon to all kinds of teams who no longer have to self-manage and distribute logo files. That sort of day-to-day management now sits with one responsible party.
What we learned?
- If you don’t raise your brand, someone else will.
As we consolidated the brand management work to a single team, across a total of 12 months, we quickly saw the vast amount of work it took to really manage the brand, only it had previously been distributed, effectively outsourced to every employee. While that’s not an awful concept, it did shine a light on the fact that we had a missing piece to our puzzle: we needed humans that were dedicated to managing the brand identity. So we started an in-house Studio team. It started with a central Creative Director, Morten Bustrup, and grew over time to a full creative team that included our own internal design team, as well as creative momentum from our agency partners that the Studio team managed. - One good deed leads to another.
While it started as a passion project for the UX design team, the brand iteration attracted a lot of interested parties from around the company. Marketers wanted in, salespeople wanted their materials updated to the new forms, and proposal writers were hot to update their pitch decks. We welcomed the open collaboration. Those sales decks got updated, the pitch materials were overhauled, we ended up with a new global email signature standard, we finally wrote out our editorial and copywriting standards, and we updated our icon and illustration systems as well. The brand iteration built more brand ambassadors around the org which gave new life to the updated brand identity: a big, intangible win for the company whose identity had stalled over the years. - Start now, not tomorrow.
These days, markets accelerate quicker than the architecture that contains them, and if a year these days can feel more like a decade, then our brand had fallen eons behind the curve. Velocity works the same way inside of a company. There is no ideal time “coming up” to stop and do this kind of work. You have to fit it in and go all-in to treat it like a real project. Executive support is key, but so is saying “we’re going to do this,” and then actively carving out time to attack it. You can do a week-long design-a-thon like we did. You could do a 2-hour “Creative Fridays” block every two weeks. You could do a 15-minute design swarm 3 days a week. You can make it happen, you just have to prioritize it and invest the time. - Let others do the work for you.
When you’re doing this type of work as an in-house team, you are in an extremely advantaged position. You’re more tuned into company and culture than any outsider could ever hope to be. The more one understands this culture and how people are connected to it, the more you are able to design effective brand provocation. Agencies bill millions of dollars a year to do the work you are connected to every day. Talk to people inside the business about your brand and start building a journal of your findings. When you decide to prioritize the work, you’ll have a much more informed starting position.
