INTUIT CASE STUDY (1 of 2)

From a house of brands to a branded house

My first experience in Big Tech was to join Intuit’s mission based team in Marketing and Communications, solely responsible for the rebrand and redesign for all product logos. I led the redesign efforts with my expertise logos and type, while creating/utilizing new frameworks that expedited our efforts.

The year was 2015, and Intuit set out on a journey to go from a house of brands, to a branded house. At the time, most customers did not know who Intuit was. But everyone knew of TurboTax and QuickBooks.

I had the honor to join Intuit to drive their rebranding effort which then spawned a new design system.

BEFORE

Above: The only attempt to unify the bespoke brands previously was to stick the Intuit logo somewhere in each product logo.

The majority of Intuit’s design team had very little experience developing logos or brands. Most of that work was farmed out to external agencies.

My initial goal was to break down the work into fundamental design elements that helped guide the team through critiques & approvals while allowing us to make progress in incremental phases. Below are the 4 areas.

COLOR

Leverage the new color palette from the new design system.

GRID

First application of the atomic grid from the new design system.

MARK

Retained the essence of the original marks, while finding cohesion amongst all.

TYPE

Meticulously enhanced the new font, Avenir Next, to fit our needs.

By decoupling the logo mark from type, we were able to continuously iterate with daily/weekly design reviews. As we narrowed on some marks, others needed more explorations. Throughout the process, we explored metaphors that resonated with the product benefits and their individual brand attributes.

There were over 15 rounds of revisions documented, with stakeholder check-ins, customer research sessions, and acid testing.

Throughout the process, we examined logo type options by dissecting fonts from each business unit for unique attributes. Each BU had their own respective font of choice. However, Intuit declared AvenirNext as the new default font for all products to unify our customer experiences.

Special consideration was made to the font weight so the logos could scale for the web. The result was a custom font weight only for the logotype.

Font Attributes

Dissecting and analyzing fonts for unique attributes.

Custom Font Weight

Stakeholders informed us that AvenirNext Demi was too light, but bold was too bold. So I created a custom weight between the them.

Atomic Grid

Finding a balance with weights on the atomic grid.

AFTER

Above: Final approved design after approximately 4 months of work.