When I joined this tech startup in March 2015, it was called MBJ Integrated Technologies, mostly referred to as MBJ. It was a consultancy business focused on the design and development of websites and mobile applications. Its logo immediately recalled IBM because of the squared serif typeface and the assonance of the letters. Overall, it looked quite outdated, especially because of the green-to-black gradient on the "M". Also, the meaning behind the acronym wasn't easily associable with the business (the letters are the founder's initials), and that was causing confusion and general brand weakness.
As the Lead Designer and then the Creative Director, I always highlighted how important branding is for a company image and for its employees culture. You can read my interview posted on the MBJ's blog here.
The main problem was trying to find a common ground between the request of a "not-too-disruptive" change for the core team and its affectionate clients, and the new logo.
In the meantime the company started growing and it dropped "Integrated Technologies" from its name. It became MBJ LONDON, with the scaling intention to change the name of the city following "MBJ" for each new office opened around the globe.
There have been many attempts and eventually in June we came to a decision to remove the gradient and went for a dimmer green shade, defined a new colour scheme, and accordingly re-designed the whole website.
Once MBJ opened its third office in Berlin, a major overhaul became necessary. Together with the in-house graphic designer and the content strategy manager we worked really hard to get to a meaningful and modernised facelift.
After plenty of research, new marketing strategy, branding-related questionnaires to the core team and the employees, and big presentations, we finally achieved some interesting results, which led to the company developing its acronym into "Modern Business Journey".
"We have found that increasingly in today’s digital-first world, a modern business’s journey begins online. As a WaaS [Website as a Service] company, we are in the business of telling our client's stories through the websites we create for them. With our recent rebrand, we wanted to move the MBJ identity away from exclusively telling our brand’s story, and instead, start focusing on following our client’s inspirational journeys online."
