Euromonitor International Brand Identity
Euromonitor International wanted a thorough and complete refresh of its brand identity in 2009 and the company hired me with that as one of my primary responsibilities. After the brand’s relaunch through its website, I oversaw the brand’s maintenance, evolution, and extension over nearly a decade.
My Function
- Head of Design
Skills Applied
- Design leadership
- Design management
- Brand design
- Creative direction
A Fountain of Knowledge
At its base level, Euromonitor provides its customers and clients a wealth of market data. However, data just provides a broad foundation for an enormous pyramid comprised of information and capped with knowledge.
The application of researchers’ experience and expertise created the information and the ability to synthesise findings across multiple industries and geographies generated the knowledge provided by the company. Consequently, the company’s products and bespoke consulting services offered multiple streams of knowledge emanating from a single source: Euromonitor.
The fountain of knowledge idea centred the entire brand identity of the company, beginning with an abstracted fountain for a logo. Each stream intended to link to a distinct offering of the company, most importantly its soon-after-to-be-branded Passport. In time the overlapping streams of the fountain would evolve into the next iteration of the identity launched in 2016.
Design Team Brand
- Head of Design
- 1 × senior designer
- 2 × designers
Transparency and Clarity. A Little Quirky. All Premium.
Over time I honed the defining characteristics of Euromonitor brand to transparency and clarity. As a market research company whose core product surfaced a wealth of data, information, and knowledge, Euromonitor’s reliability was critical to its success. Euromonitor demonstrated said reliability through openness with the methodology, context and analysis from researchers and experts, and lines of communication should clients have questions. But underpinning everything at the then 40-year old company was the sentiment expressed by ownership and directors, “we’re quirky”.
One method by which we expressed Euromonitor’s transparency was the use of opacity and overlays. This approach extended from the company logo, whose streams overlapped, creating new colours (and opportunities). This allowed my team to explore the use of gradients as a new element for the visual brand, which would find their ultimate expression in the website refresh and social media.
In my final year the company directed staff to be “premium in all we do” My team and I approached this from a luxury angle and started incorporating black and white photography into our premium offerings. I directed the photography for these four marketing brochure covers.
Iconography
Euromonitor organised its research by industries then categories. Early in the brand refresh process we identified the need to distinguish between these industries as a high priority. One method by which we visually distinguished the industries was through each being assigned an industry icon.
Initially the need was small, literally. We had a 20×20 pixel place for each icon and consequently my earliest icons were single-colour abstractions of the industry or something related to the industry. In time, as new industries were established, designing an icon became part of the release process. Additionally, the icons were made to be used across Euromonitor’s child brands, namely Passport and Euromonitor Consulting.
Over time, however, design updates to the brand, products, and technology allowed us to grow the icons—though the 20-pixel versions remained needed. First we designed 40×40 pixel versions and then sometime later newer updates allowed us to evolve to an even larger 80×80 pixel set, which allowed for a far richer illustrative style.
Industries Covered
- 20×20 pixel set
- 40×40 pixel set
- 80×80 pixel set
- 42 industries covered
Touchpoints Big and Small. Local and Global.
As a global company, Euromonitor needed branded material everywhere, both physical and digital. Sometimes my team and I worked locally out of Chicago and shipped internationally, other times we worked with vendors in global markets.
Not only did I adapt the brand identity for building signage and wayfinding systems, but I oversaw physical brand applications down to trade show booths, swag, and posters. The company website, showcased here, was a digital expression featuring branded downloadable content including white papers. But I also designed personal applications like company softball uniforms down to branded cocktail napkins for sales/marketing events.
The brand guidelines I designed allowed for globalisation of materials and, later, content. My typographic decisions allowed for content to be branded and produced in not just non-English languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, but also languages that did not use the Latin alphabet, e.g. Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic.
Brand Touchpoints Designed
- Corporate website
- Interior/Exterior signage
- C-suite presentations
- Client presentations
- Adobe CC templates
- Microsoft Office templates
- Social media templates
- Brand guidelines
- Training materials
- Infographics
- White papers
- Stationery
- Event collateral/swag
- Trade show booths/displays
