When Red Sea set out to expand their operations into new territories, they wanted to let new audiences know about their powerful supply chain capabilities with a bold and impactful brand experience.
Beyond a few stipulations from management regarding content and tone of voice, we were given a completely clean slate to craft a new brand identity, and corporate and product websites.
"Local insights and expertise that can only come from long-standing 'boots on the ground' relationships"
Telling, not selling a story
Unusually for a corporate marketing site, we purposefully omitted any direct sales pitch in favour of first telling the Red Sea story.
It took some convincing with the team at Red Sea, however they appreciated that it was critical to the success of the new brand that they first and foremost tell of their rise to prominence, and the meaningful and measurable impact they have had on the growth and success of their customers.
The marketing team at Red Sea are old school zero-bs, no nonsense salesmen, so we focussed messaging on highlighting their local insights and expertise that can only come from long-standing 'boots on the ground' relationships with native supply chains. These guys know what talking about.
What you need, where you need it
Red Sea has the power to deliver exactly what you need to where you need it – their ambition reflects their customers'.
We used this as our starting point for creating the new logo and identity design, thinking about the idea of reflection - that the brands ambition should reflect the customers ambition – and eventually settled on a design that combined a carefully and precisely typeset wordmark and symbol that was simple, stylish, and more importantly, worked for the Red Sea team.
Speaking your language
Building out the design system, the most challenging element was the multiple languages. Anyone who's had to deal with implementing a multilingual design system will know it can be a tough nut to crack; varying text length, LTR/RTL layouts, multi-language fonts, as well as cultural awareness, translation etc.
We began solving this by sourcing a typeface that contained character sets for 5 languages – having just a single typeface would maintain a consistent typographic system for content creation.
We then set to work on a layout grid, typographic standards, colour usage (a secondary black was a great compliment to the primary red) , and UI element standards for branded content and the websites, iterating on the design structure until I had a balanced and scalable composition.
A potent and memorable message
For the Tone of Voice, the most significant consideration was communicating Red Sea's envious global presence, but also the brands confident and direct approach.
Rounding off the visual identity phase, we created all the stationary templates, styleguide to govern implementation, and a UI stencil for future digital applications.
And we captured the Red Sea brand story in a combination of video and motion graphics that delivers a potent and memorable message – one of determination, tenacity, reliability, and sheer bloody hard work.
