A complete corporate rebranding exercise including renaming, brand development and website design.
Years ago, we partnered with a power generation startup in Toronto to create their burgeoning brand and online marketing, including logo design, website design and both digital and print marketing assets. Ten years later, several of the original team members moved on to purchase NRG Peaks and Workbench, and our Toronto web design company was trusted to oversee the corporate rebranding and website design for the merger of the two companies.
Corporate Rebranding and Design Goals
- Business naming – with the merger of two established businesses, NRG Peaks and Workbench, we sought to create a new parent company to unify the brand and honour the long-standing relationships each business already maintained with customers.
- Corporate rebranding – once a new parent company was created and named our Toronto logo designers set to work creating a new corporate brand for Workbench Energy to support the merger and development marketing assets for the campaign ahead.
- Digital marketing design – to help marketing the new brand and unify all communications within the company, we aimed to create a series of branded marketing assets, including whitepapers, presentations, reports and digital graphics.
- Website user interface design – along with the corporate rebrand, our Toronto web designers were tasked with creating a brand new website user interface design to rollout with the announcement of the merger.
- Custom WordPress development – to allow our clients’ maximum control over their online presence and digital marketing, we planned to develop the new website on a custom WordPress installation.
Branding and Web Design Process
Strategy and Research
It’s not very often that we get involved with naming exercises as part of our brand strategy. In this case, however, given our history of working with the team at Workbench Energy, we invested a solid week in brainstorming. We came up with a dozen names to consider for the new parent company. In the end, the team fell in love with Workbench Energy, which was essentially a reversal of the two sub-brands that intertwined the two into the parent brand quite effectively.
With a new name for the parent company ironed out, we left the Workbench team to look after registration and all the fun elements that come along with registering a new business and focused our attention on brand strategy.
As our creative experts shifted into logo design mode, our Toronto web designers began initial strategy work with a site mapping exercise to map out the new website. Site map design played a crucial role in this project as we aimed to merge two existing websites into one more extensive website.
Following site mapping, our web design experts quickly advanced with conceptual wireframe designs. We shared the wireframes with the Workbench team using our interactive prototyping and collaboration tool, allowing everyone to view the plans in context and share feedback within the group. With all the wrinkles neatly ironed out, we were able to move on to the user interface design phase – always everyone’s favourite in our 6-step design process.
Logo Design
Custom logo design is most often a challenging undertaking as the logo serves as a foundational element within the brand and everything that follows. Our Toronto logo designers got to work with conceptual design work and slowly refined our ideas into three solid options for the team at Workbench to consider.
After several discussions with our client, they selected a winner for the new parent company logo design. Our next steps were to apply the new design system and colour palette to the existing sub-brands, NRG Peaks and Workbench, to give them a refresh and bring them into the fold with the new parent brand. Having all three entities under one brand umbrella would then offer consistency and solidarity throughout all facets of the business and communications with customers new and old.
Branded Assets Design
With our new brand family fresh out of the incubator, we set to work on expanding the new brand across the various media that the Workbench team will use to market their services for years to come. Moving quickly through the business systems design to ensure they have professional cards, letterheads, reports and whitepaper design templates, we paved the way for a beautiful new presentation deck design. Within the deck, we crafted a series of beautifully branded templates that would allow the Workbench team to quickly piece together professional-looking presentations on the fly and minimize the time and expense of creating these marketing and sales tools from scratch for each presentation.
