Early Days
When Kitbash was a new upstart agency, founder Jeff Rodgers reached out to me for help with creating a simple logo and landing page. The word "kitbash" means to take pieces and parts from several different models and combine them to create something custom and unique. To Jeff, the term evoked memories of a childhood where the only limit to your creativity was your imagination. For this reason, our first iteration of the brand was a retro, modified script wordmark. The landing page followed suit with distressed textures and subtle, debossed text.
Exploring Our Identity
It didn't take long for Kitbash to grow into a full service design agency with 4 employees, and I joined the team full-time as Senior Art Director. The old logo was okay and served its purpose, but as we grew, it became evident that our logo was no longer an accurate representation of our work or our brand. The style was far too trendy and we needed a brand that would stand the test of time.
Rebranding yourself can be a daunting task. Our brand is built on the idea that something is better when it’s handmade–when form and function get equal billing. We wanted this idea to permeate the Kitbash brand, so we treated ourselves like one of our clients. We spent countless hours analyzing our beliefs, our goals, and our identity. We kept coming back to the themes of handcrafted, blue collar, and simple. So, we took these themes and began our logo explorations.
During the logo design process, our team explored dozens of concepts and hundreds of variations. Above is a small section of one of my working files along with some of my favorite marks.
New Logo
After months of ideation and iteration, we completed the rebrand. Now, let’s take a closer look at the blueprint of our new mark. The segmentation of the mark really appealed to us. If you imagine the lines are cuts, you are left with 2 simple shapes—a square and a triangle. The mark can be built so easily out of the most basic forms, and yet it is unique. It’s also easily identifiable at all sizes. This gives us plenty of flexibility when using the mark on its own. The interior shapes form the Kitbash “K”, and the thin lines and angles almost feel like blueprints.
Color palette for the Kitbash brand
Results
Although we were lucky enough to have client work before we had a proper brand and website, the new look Kitbash was turning heads. Our refreshed identity and online portfolio full of client work resulted in double the amount of incoming work orders, and led to us landing what would become our largest future clients.