The process
DueDil is risk management and corporate data company. I joined DueDil in early days when company was formed by 3 people, today hires 100+ employees and got funded $30m. For a long time I was the only designer and scope of my responsibilities was very broad. I worked on website design, user experience, interface, brand identity and many collaborative projects.
Duedil is about finding the right companies and looking at them closely. We explored many different shapes but combining the magnifying glass and target symbols felt like a perfect combination for a logo. We went through brand refresh process few years earlier only to decide that the current symbol is the right one and we only changed the colour and the logotype typeface so it would match the rest of the brand identity and the user interface. Everyone in the team liked how simple and readable symbol is at all sizes, and remains to look cool. Developers also appreciated the geometric structure which I believe communicates the precision and stability.
Colour palette was a difficult problem to solve. We didn't want to use hundreds of colours for our graphs and turn Duedil into another dribbble-like data concept. We were going for smart, elegant look - have a look at TheNewYorkTimes infographics, Bloomberg or Wired for reference. We didn't want for data-vis to feel very different from the rest of the website. We wanted to look bold and confident, that's why we decided to keep our primary colours charcoal black and white and only added red/green for prominent call to actions. We obviously needed to communicate graphs which was challenging with only 2 colors, that's why we added blue, gold and bunch of tints to the palette.
I think first time we came across helvetica because of the technical issues with applying other fancy fonts to the first version of Duedil (in 2010) at the time web typography wasn't as advanced level as it is today and other fonts caused problems with the site and their rendering was horrible. Helvetica just looked right, legible, felt smart, cool and well-established. Helvetica looks great as 13px link test and even better as 48px bold header. It was also the font that we could easily spread across the brand presentations, documents, collateral and social media. We even decided to use it for the logo refresh couple years ago (mentioned above).
We always tried to keep marketing and product as a very seamless experience. If you take other brands like Dropbox or Uber, and look at their marketing campaigns, emails etc. they fill very much like their product. We were building the brand, fighting for trust of our customers and recognition on the market. To able to do that you need maximum consistency. I'm sure you will be able to find more than few examples where we went bit off track to meet the brief needs but general rule was always to communicate who we are, what we do, what we stand for by exact same visual approach - hierarchy of colour and typography, simple layout, detailed icons, illustrations and support support all that with crisp photography whenever we could.
