Everfield
Fostering ambition, fuelling growth: Updating the Everfield Brand
What started as a new website led to a whole brand relaunch, strategy, and company-wide goal setting exercise.
Client
Evefield
Segment
Venture Capital
Discipline
Brand Startegy, Creative Direction, Producing Photoshoots, Web Design, Graphic Design
Office
London
Website
everfield.com
Where it started?
Deciding to redo a corporate website can open a Pandora’s box of dependencies and opportunities. With a handful of people, limited resources and a timeline, how can a small team create something that satisfies stakeholders, is beautiful but recognisable for customers, and creates a timeless brand for a company in a traditional industry?
Here’s how we approached it at Everfield, while hiring the team that delivered the end project.
Defining what needed to be done
Before a new Everfield website could be made, more work needed to be put into documenting Everfield’s mission, where it’s going, and why.
“I knew this was not just a website project but a whole branding exercise, so we started talking about it,” says Chris Kobylecki, Platform Lead at Everfield, who was tasked with kicking this project off.
“The key was to set scope, stakeholders involved by deciding who was responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed, (RACI), and budget at the very beginning of the project,” Chris says. “We did an iteration of kick-off meetings to define that and build an understanding of what we’re about to do.”
Even though Everfield is a young company founded in the middle of 2022, we have gone through so much growth, acquiring 12+ companies, and growing the headquarters team by 2x. The company that the brand was designed for no longer existed. Aligning once more at a management level on where Everfield is and wants to go was required for the rebranding and website project to be a success.
The visual identity: A focus on people and data
Gabi Malacha joined the team as Design Lead while this project was underway. An expert in visual design and brand, she knew exactly what needed to be done for this rebrand to be successful.
She worked closely with Chris, Marcin, and a freelance writer to transform the Everfield identity through colour, font, and graphic elements.
”I start every rebranding project with the story behind the company including the mission, vision, values, audience, differentiation from the competition, and examples of other brands that stakeholders like,” says Gabi. “Since the Everfield brand already existed, I spent time understanding what worked and what should be updated.”
People are the core to what we do at Everfield, and highlighting real people became a key element that needed to be added for the rebrand. The previous designs featured very few people, but leaned heavily on data, and more balance was needed between the two.
From internal and external feedback, it became clear the old visual identity was too tech and data-focused, causing people to believe Everfield was a software development agency that built digital products, as opposed to a trusted partner that acquires software companies.
“I knew that it didn’t communicate the message in the right way,” says Gabi
Real photos of the Everfield team
as a crucial element of visual communication
A photoshoot was needed to capture Everfield’s growing team. Stock photos would quickly age and look inauthentic, did not fully capture how important people are to Everfield’s strategy, and would not build the trust needed. Leaders of small but growing companies should feel confident that Everfield is the right partner to sell their businesses to, and that they would get to know our team.
“The brand story starts with why and how a company started,” says Gabi. “It’s not just about choosing fonts and colours, the visual identity should showcase and inspire the people who interact with it.”
We defined where and how these photos would be used before the photoshoot began to maximise the time and financial investment. Photos were modelled to capture situations and moods strategically chosen to tell an overall story for the website, in presentations, and on social media channels. These can be used for the year going forward, and Google is rewarding websites that have original content in all media. Plus, select people got new headshots, creating a cohesive look for Everfield across social channels.
“Rapid growth and an extending Pan-European footprint felt like the right moment to refresh our brand, says Marcin Szelag, COO at Everfield.
“This project allowed us to revisit Everfield’s vision and define an ambitious goal of becoming one of Europe’s most active software acquirers. I believe that a strong and recognisable brand will allow us to differentiate Everfield from competitors and become a category-defining company.”
Chris’ work with the leadership team on identifying our Hedgehog, setting big hairy audacious goals, and defining our mission and vision led to a change in how we speak about Everfield the organisation.
We wanted to focus on building a European ecosystem that becomes stronger the more companies we acquire, and on leveraging data to make incremental changes that compound into growth over time.
Once Everfield’s mission, vision, and goals were clear, it was time to turn that into a visual identity.
“I was looking for fonts that were a combination of modern and traditional aesthetics,” says Gabi. “They couldn’t look old fashioned, but I wanted to include traditional design elements, such as the use of serif fonts for printed books. This connotation with knowledge and wisdom was important for me to communicate.”
Typography
The brand fonts and colours were updated to represent a calmer, more mature aesthetic. Fonts were chosen from an independent agency because of their uniqueness and dedication to simplicity. Having a serif font for headers was important, as it is a timeless element often used in traditional media and adds weight to the words written for it. A sans serif font was chosen for the majority of content because of its readability on digital screens and flexibility for use in presentations and other media.
People and data don’t usually go together, but Gabi realised that circles can be used to represent both people and data for Everfield. Building meaning and telling stories with dots became a large part of the visual brand.
“I remembered that the story behind the logo was something that resonated with our leadership,” says Gabi. “I realised that the meaning behind the dots in our logo could be brought out more in the brand’s visual identity.”
Circles feature heavily in the new branding in different forms, appearing in large and small sizes, extrapolated and overlayed, and in every rounded corner (you’ll rarely find any other kind in our new brand).
Updating the logo was important to make it more modern and timeless, while continuing to tell the existing Everfield brand story. Updating the font and changing the scale of the dots to be the same within the logo also makes it easier and more versatile to use across different brand assets.
A website
A huge component of a brand redesign involves updating a website with new content and visual identity. It also usually involves revisiting the technology stack a website uses, and deciding if it serves the businesses purposes moving forward.
“My favourite mantra throughout this project was not in version one,” Chris adds.
Chris cautions others to take it slow before jumping into building a website. “Rebrand or website projects are the worst kind of projects when you’re dealing with unclear expectations and constant rising demands,” he says. “Yet you learn a lot, have to set priorities, and stick to them because this can get blown out of proportion in seconds.”
Scaling the brand: Internal guidelines for everyone
Having clear guidelines for everyone internally to follow are what will make the Everfield brand scale. These should give people the confidence to create branded documents, presentations, articles and social posts that are on brand, telling the same story, and that people want to hear.
The guidelines will also help us define what activities we pursue, such as conferences to attend, communications channels to use, emails we choose to send, and new ventures we embark on.
“I hope that we at Everfield are able to speak the same language about what we do, and how we show ourselves,” says Chris.
