Refreshing Minim's visual brand

Role

Design Direction

Tools

Figma
Adobe Creative Suite

Summary

As a result of a merger with Zoom Telephonics and a shift to prioritize our consumer WiFi products, Minim sought to refocus and reinvigorate our visual brand for better alignment. Special care was taken not to alienate our B2B customers. The ensuing refresh encompassed a logo redesign, tweaks to the color palette, selection of a new typeface, and a refinement of imagery guidelines. The refresh was highly successful in improving Minim’s brand perception, ease of implementation, and accessibility for the visually impaired.

About Minim

Minim, Inc. delivers intelligent software to protect and improve the WiFi connections we depend on to work, learn, and live. Headquartered in Manchester, N.H., Minim holds the exclusive global license to design and manufacture consumer networking products under the Motorola brand.

Logo a-go-go

The original Minim logo, structural and angular, had been designed to appeal to tech-savvy internet service providers who desired reliable and innovative solutions to market to their subscribers. The move to a consumer-focused business model necessitated a shift in our brand expression that better aligned with the new audience. While this new audience also valued reliability and innovation, our intent to position modems and routers as lifestyle products meant that we needed to project a brand identity that conveyed those same characteristics to an audience viewing us through a different lens.

To accomplish this task we enlisted the help of andCulture, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based design agency. Together we explored many iterations to arrive at the final design.

The redesigned logo conveys the same values of reliability and innovation in new ways. Where the old logo used rigidity to convey reliability, the new logo uses heavier weight type; it is an unmovable object prepared to weather any network disaster. Where the old logo conveyed innovation through its futuristic, angular ‘M,’ the new logo presents a more approachable, future-forward perspective through its softer lowercase letter forms set in a clean sans-serif typeface. Lastly, a bold pink tittle (dot), resting above the carved-out top of the second “i”, represents Minim as the center of your connected home, creating a memorable symmetry between the full wordmark and abbreviated monogram.

The original Minim logo was designed to target a tech-savvy enterprise customer

Example from the early exploration phase of the logo refresh

The refreshed logo better supported our shift in go-to-market strategy

Developing a refined palette

Over the course of a year, we gradually evolved the Minim brand to focus on a subset of the full color palette. To streamline its ease of implementation for our growing team, we decided to codify the changes and officially remove the extraneous colors from the palette. We then tweaked the remaining colors, increasing their saturation and lowering their brightness, to convey the bold and disruptive disposition that defines the Minim “Ahead” brand value. Our final step was to remove the cool hue from the black and gray colors to better meld with customer brands in our white-labeled products.

Special attention was given to the accessibility of the chosen colors ensuring we would achieve at least AA, and often AAA, accessibility in all implementations across marketing and product.

The original Minim brand palette was overly complex and difficult for non-designers to implement consistently

The refreshed brand palette was simple and bold to ensure it was easy to implement and visually accessible

She’s just our type

The original Minim typefaces Questrial and Lato were more stereotypically “techy” and somewhat outdated for the innovative lifestyle brand identity we wished to project. We explored many typefaces, judging each within the context of marketing and product mockups, to arrive at our final choice: Pulp Display. It is a light, friendly, and energetic typeface that provides the perfect glue between the new Minim wordmark, palette, and imagery.

To ensure perfect implementation every time, we developed new design guidelines which included a tool in which a designer could input a headline size to automatically calculate the sizes, spacing, and leading of subheads and paragraphs.

The original Minim typefaces were outdated and targeted an enterprise audience

The refreshed typeface was the perfect choice to reflect our company values of "Simple", "Trusted", and "Ahead"

Projecting the right image

Changes to our imagery guidelines, though simple, were quite impactful in changing the overall brand expression. Previously we had used a mix of stylized isometric illustrations and lifestyle photography to appeal to our customers and their customers. With the increased emphasis on lifestyle products, we decided to cut the isometric illustrations from our marketing design except in cases where their use was necessary to illustrate concepts.

We also introduced a new background pattern to replace the old one which no longer melded with the refreshed brand elements. The new pattern, an energetic abstract representation of WiFi signals, provided an easy way to jazz up text-focused designs, presentations, and team Zoom backgrounds.