The Heehaw Rebrand
What’s In a Brand?
A company’s brand is their public persona. It’s the way a company presents themselves to the world, to potential clients, and to themselves. It’s a definition of how to look, feel, and act. Most importantly, good branding draws people in to see what the company has in store for them.
Let’s face it, our world is becoming increasingly about consuming more content than ever before. We’re after the next best film, the next best book, the next Reel or TikTok in the endless stream of content pouring from our phone. We’re guilty of it at Heehaw, everyone is. But for us, we’ve been spending the last two years chasing the new us. The new Heehaw.
It’s officially safe to say we’ve pulled it off.
Welcome to Heehaw 2.0.
Why Branding is Important
Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business. It gives your clients and customers an initial look into what it was your business does and whether you might be the right fit for them. Good brands convey themes, tones, and emotions to your customer base and sometimes can be the difference between making a potential client into a conversion.
Essentially, branding is the way your clients identify, build relationships with, and remember your business.
With this in mind, our managing director wanted to rebrand Heehaw into something more charismatic, confident, and compelling. We wanted our clients to instantly see our logo and branding and go, “Oh yeah, Heehaw. Those guys make great content.”
In the world of video production, that immediate recognition is important. Competition is fierce, there’s loads of great companies out there. We needed to stand out from the crowd with a bold look that captured the essence of what we do. And, here’s the key point, we wanted to do it ourselves.
Yeah, you read that right. We did our own rebrand. Every aspect, from the background colour of this website, to the font style, even the dynamic departmental logos you see in our Services page, all of that was designed completely in house. Who better understands your brand than you, right? Our thoughts exactly.
How We Did It
We’ll be straight with you from the get go here: this took a while. Okay, more than a while. It took a long time. Two years of work went into this, two years where our designers pitched, re-pitched, and eventually settled on a single idea for us to work with. It took multiple meetings with our managing director, numerous sessions where we narrowed, expanded, and then re-narrowed what we wanted.
Rebranding a company isn’t easy. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it every step of the way. So let’s break it down.
The Feeling
Bold. Confident. New.
These were the themes that stuck with us while our designers worked on their pitches for a new brand. Feeling should be where every company designing a brand should consider first and foremost. How do you want to look to the outside world? What do you want your clients or customer base to feel when they see your branding? How can your branding give them a clue to the services your team can provide?
We knew right from the start that we wanted to leave our old theme of playfulness in the past. Heehaw has changed a lot as a film agency since we were founded in 2000, and our old branding did not tell our story properly. That’s not to say we aren’t a playful company anymore. We’re a creative marketing agency based in Edinburgh, we have to be playful when we’re coming up with film creatives. But we wanted to place more of an emphasis on feeling bold, oozing confidence, and feeling fresh and new.
The Departmental Icons
If you’ve studied our new departmental icons at all, you may have noticed how to all look a bit like a camera shutter. That was intentional. We’re a film agency, playing with the idea of a camera shutter for our logos was a fun concept that still adhered to our three keywords while also telling our company story through simple imagery.
We are, essentially, a one-stop shop where our fully in-house team creates the video content our clients are looking for. Our team handles it all. Strategy, Animation, Motion Design, and Film are our four main departments, so having icons for each department was something we didn’t know we wanted, or even needed, until we developed the first one. After that it become apparent that we needed icons for each department. Our lead designer, Charlie, designed and lead every aspect of the branding and made sure that the icons looked distinct enough to act as a kind of visual language while also being dynamic enough to morph and blend together to tell the comprehensive story of our company, a company that is always in motion, always moving forwards.
The Wordmark and New Font
Our new wordmark was the idea that kicked it all off. It was designed to appear as if the letters are in a constant state of motion, in the same way we as a company create moving content for our clients. We also continuously push boundaries as a company that’s always moving forward. Creating the cropped lettering not only gives this illusion, but also plays with the symmetrical formation of the word itself.
With the wordmark in hand we wanted to develop a font that piggybacked on the design, something that could go across all of our official documents, website copy, and scripts. The nice, shiny font you’re reading is what our font designer cooked up.
The Colours
A fresh, bold colour scheme tied it all together. We wanted each department to have a unique look while still being complementary enough to work as a whole. It was important to us that the colours were bright, eye-catching, and created a stark contrast against the developed off-black hero colour so that each colour encapsulated not only the nature of each department’s work, but also the dynamic team of creatives within them.
And there you have it. Heehaw 2.0, ready for action.
Looking for a creative film agency to create compelling video content for your audience? Let us know what you have in mind here and our team will get back to you.