05 | CASE STUDY (2018)

Redesigning and unifying Intuit’s bespoke product brands

Intuit is a financial software company that offers solutions for tax preperation, small business accounting / bookkeeping, as well as personal finance management. This use case goes over the redesign efforts for their suite of logos and brands.


 

Overview

The year was 2015, and Intuit set out on a journey to go from a house of brands, to a branded house. The bespoke brands had nothing in common and the only attempt to unify them was the placement of an Intuit logo somewhere in each product logo.
 
 

Design approach

I joined the team in late 2017. Prior to that, all branding was outsourced to external agencies. My initial goal was to break down the work into fundamental design elements that helped guide the team through critiques and approvals while allowing us to make progress in incremental phases.
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.
 

Going broad...

By decoupling the logo mark from type, we were able to continuously iterate with daily/weekly design reviews. Throughout the process, we explored metaphors that resonated with the product benefits and individual brand attributes.
 

... going narrow

As we narrowed on some marks, others needed more explorations. We leveraged qualitative research to see what resonated with customers. After 15 rounds of revisions, below are the final logo marks.
 
 
 

Typography

Throughout the process, we examined logo type treatments by dissecting various fonts from each business unit. Special consideration was made to the font weight of AvenirNext 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.
Atomic Grid
Finding a balance with weights on the atomic grid.

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.
 

Final Logo

In the spring of 2018, Intuit finally became a branded house. The redesigned logos began to rollout in all collateral and product experiences. Soon after, the formation of Intuit’s first design system kicked off a new era of product unification.
 
 
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