After ten years in the market, seven offices around the globe, and 400+ consultants, Avenue Code — a San Francisco-based IT consultancy — sought to refresh its brand to represent how diverse it had become over the years, both people and solution-wise.

Opportunities to improve Avenue Code past brand identity were identified via research at the start of a 3-stage process to refresh it. With scalability and visual cohesiveness identified as action points, the 2nd stage began with concept exploration, eventually leading us to colorful visuals inspired by street art and urban life.

With an expanded color palette tied to a set of eight new company values, a new typeface based on highway signage, and communication guidelines, the project’s last stage started by scaling the core concepts to multiple mediums: presentation decks, notebooks, shirts, websites, posts, and even office artwork.

The campaign to roll out the new brand kicked off by asking employees to deliver cards, each corresponding to one of the eight new values and palettes, to one another based on which value they identified their peers to represent. During the next eight weeks, employees engaged in activities to get to know the brand and celebrate one another.

The rebranding concluded with positive, unsolicited engagement on the company’s Glassdoor page. In addition, employee attrition was lower for eight months than the previous year after the campaign release. ∎