How we're rebranding Copyfolio—both online & IRL

Dorka Kardos-Latif

Hitting the spot with your tone and style makes or breaks your marketing. But all marketers know the feeling when branding is just never important enough to get to work on—and then you’re left with assets that don’t appeal to your customers anymore. It’s frustrating at best, harming your business at worst.

The good thing about working at a UX design company is that this won’t happen to you. Since everyone lives and breathes customer experience, needing a brand that sets you apart and resonates with your target audience is a given.

So when our latest round of research confirmed that our new product direction and the latest shift in our customer persona didn’t align with our branding anymore, we got the green light to refresh our branding right away. Here’s how our small team of six did it.

Branding workshops galore

The first step was figuring out the new direction, so we jumped into a series of workshops, of course.

One of Copyfolio's many branding workshops, with a marketer standing in front of a wall of post-its in an "opposite thinking" exercise

Brand DNA: our brand personality, target audience, and USP

We…

had a session led by our product lead to figure out our new USP (unique selling proposition),
got clear about who we are as a brand, what our personality traits are, and what values we want to represent,
and discussed who our updated target audience is for whom we’re designing our new features.

It was all done the old-school way: in the office, with loads of snacks, and endless post-its on the wall. We work in a hybrid setup but yet again found that nothing beats bouncing ideas around and brainstorming together. Luckily we all seemed to be on the same page too, which made perfecting our new branding much much easier.

Visual branding: moodboarding, colors, and style

You’d think visual identity design belongs to the designers—but when you have a small team, a product designer with a crazy-full UX roadmap, and some adventurous marketers, things can look a little different.

So the next workshop to determine the updated visual identity of Copyfolio was organized by our marketers. We’ve spent hours scouring the internet for inspiration and design styles, then got together with the rest of the team to put all our ideas together.

The end result? A super cool moodboard, and a clear idea of the direction of the style, colors, and fonts we want to use.

airpods, a cup of coffee, and an open laptop in the sunshine, showing a branding moldboard with inspiration images, color palettes, and graphic design style examples

A new design direction: on socials & the website

This of course means a completely new look for our social media pages and a redesign for our website—but just the directions are not enough to make that happen.

Designer help when we need it

And here comes the second reason why working for a UX design company is great. When we got to this halfway point of our new visual brand but were in the middle of super intense weeks with full roadmaps, we got some extra help.

Since there was a designer with some free capacity on the agency-side of the company, we got an extra creative to finalize our branding. We all jumped into a call to walk him through all we’ve had so far and listed our top priorities for the project:

Choosing the perfect fonts and getting all the licensing info
Picking our final colors, making sure they pass the contrast check
Updating our logo to match the new design direction
Creating new designs and visuals for our landing pages

Would love to share the end results with you—but it’s still in the works at the time of writing this article. But if you’re reading this a couple of weeks after publishing, then head over to Copyfolio and see how it turned out yourself!

Brand update IRL: our new video background

But branding goes further than the digital assets. We record a lot of videos for social media (take a peek at our TikTok if you have time) but always had a feeling our background of a white wall and a half-dead-looking plant looked a tad too corporate.

We started going to cafés to shoot but that got pretty expensive pretty quickly—and was way too noisy to record talking clips. So since we were in the middle of a big rebrand, we asked for a budget to also build a new video background that reflected our new fun and bold brand personality. And, we got it. 💅

It was definitely the most fun we’ve had in a while: selecting furniture and decor, ordering everything, then making it come to life. Building the bookcase took more time than we’ll admit—but hey, we did it. After styling, arranging, then rearranging (😅) we ended up with the *perfect* video recording corner.

And the best part is that the small accessories (pillow case, posters, knick-knacks) are super easy to swap, so other teams in the company can easily use this corner too. To take videos from bland, boring, and corporate, to fun, friendly, and personable. It’s a win for everyone.

@copyfolioapp this is your sign to use props in your videos!🫶 #copyfolio #socialmediamanager #socialmediamarketing #personalbranding #marketing #ugcportfoliowebsite #portfoliowebsite #socialmediaportfolio ♬ sonido original - selenalights

‍Hey, holistic branding

UX studio banner saying "make lasting impressions with tailored experiences. Book a meeting."

If you need a helping hand to create a unified brand (from website to video corners and beyond), get in touch with us–our visual identity design service may just be what you need!

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This post was written by: Dorka Kardos-Latif
Proofread by: Johanna Székelyhidi